Chris Hale's Blog

Who is Joachim Gauck

2012-02-28T09:57:00.003+01:00

The appointment of Joachim Gauck as German president following the resignation of Christian Wulff has, it seems, been warmly welcomed in Germany - and not much commented on outside the country. Although the role of president is considered mainly 'ceremonial', German presidents are considered to have moral power, as representatives of the most powerful modern European nation. This 'moral responsibility' was why Wulff had to be dumped, despite the pettiness of his alleged misdemeanors.

So what does Gauck stand for?

For many Germans, it seems, he represents the spirit of clerical resistance to the communist GDR and especially to the STASI - the secret state police. In Britain, the Independent newspaper called him Germany's answer to Nelson Mandela. He has also been called the ‘German Havel’. However, until mid October 1989, Gauck was not at all involved in the opposition. His sons were allowed to emigrate to the FRG and he was provided a typical German car, too, a Volkswagen. In 1990, as Germany rushed to reunification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl appointed Gauck Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives - responsible for investigating 'communist crimes' in the GDR. A curious rumour has it that, using his power as Federal Commissioner, he was allowed to examine his own Stasi file for several hours in private: an opportunity for judicious 'weeding'? This privilege certainly stretched German law.

In fact Germany devotes huge resources to investigating GDR 'crimes' (and no one is claiming these didn't happen): it’s a pity that the same energy wasn’t devoted to rooting out former agents of the national socialist regime.

There is no doubt that Gauck is fiercely anti communist. He contributed to the notoriously partisan 'Black Book of Communism' (published 1997 in France and 1998 with a contribution from Gauck in German) and is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism of June 2008. More recently Gauck has, with a few reservations, backed the anti immigration figurehead and one of the best best-selling authors of non-fiction in Germany, Thilo Sarrazin, framing the latter as “courageous”.

Gauck fits the seemingly irresistible rush to the Right which is currently disfiguring the European Union. But dig deeper, and Gauck's anti Communism is rather more sinister.

Gauck's backing of both 'The Black Book of Communism' and the Prague Declaration should be understood in connection with his comments on the Holocaust. He has spoken out against what he calls an over valuing – “Überhöhung” of the Holocaust - aggressively insisting that the worst genocide in human history has to be judged alongside the crimes of various communist regimes. Gauck argues that modernity has lost its religious, read: Christian foundation. Therefore non-believers, he says, acquire a “psychological benefit” from the Holocaust, because it provides something absolute and quasi-religious. This antisemitic trope - the Shoah as religion - is a favourite right wing tactic and features heavily in the writings of anti-Zionist activists like editor of The Black Book of Communism, the former Maoist Stéphane Courtois, who asserts that Israel benefits from the claim that the Holocaust was un unprecedented crime. According to Courtois: '... a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has [...] prevented the assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world...' No decent historian denies that the Stalin period led to many heinous crimes against humanity - but not repeat not 'episodes of comparable magnitude' to the Shoah. This is anti-Semitism posing as revisionism.

See too this review of The Black Book by Noam Chomsky: ''Counting the Bodies'.

Gauck’s views on the Holocaust echo those of the German historians who set off the 'Historians' War' of the 1980s, when Ernst Nolte claimed that the Holocaust had to be understood as being provoked by Bolshevism - it was he argued a 'defensive reaction'. In other words - not our fault. It is therefore concerning that one newspaper that welcomed the appointment of Gauck was the extreme right wing Junge Freiheit - “We are President!” proclaimed a recent cover story. (By all means look for the link, I'm not posting it here...)

So a German president for our time? It certainly looks that way...

Educating Murdoch

2012-02-27T11:20:00.000+01:00

The news that the education of some of our children may be entrusted to pedagogic minions of Rupert Murdoch beggars belief.

No it doesn't.

It is completely believable.

The idea of a 'Murdoch Academy' is perfectly congruous with the gruesome damage the Coalition is doing to Britain. Osbourne is mangling the economy, Gove our schools, colleges, the minds of a generation...

And a year after the pseudo election victory of the Coalition - we hear that New Labour is to blame.

The brain dead Michael Gove is, of course, a former Times journalist who takes sycophancy for granted. What was it that attracted you to 100 year old billionaire Rupert Murdoch, Mr Gove?

The fact is that we have never sorted out education properly, never completely taken it out of the hands of the powerful and the privileged. The same applies to the health service, of course. The vultures of free enterprise were always sitting on the sidelines waiting their chance. Sadly, as the late Tony Judt argued so passionately, the imperfect yet meritocratic system that was in place before the well meant reforms of the comprehensive movement has largely been destroyed.

What are we left with? A poisonous, elitist educational culture driven by the worst Victorian values.

Gray, Immortalization

2012-02-14T10:51:00.001+01:00

I have just begun 'Thinking the 20th Century' - conversations between Timothy Snyder and the late Tony Judt. It promises to be very rewarding. What a magnificent way to commemorate a great historian and thinker. More that later...

I was very disappointed by John Gray's 'The Immortalization Commission'. As fellow blogger Nige might say - this is a rum book indeed. Nothing wrong in my book with rum writing and thinking, but this is a disappointment.

Gray links together thoughts about an obscure episode to do with the Victorian Society for Psychical Research, the Soviet obsession with the immortality of deceased leaders and contemporary obsessions with 'immortality', the subject of a book by Bryan Appleyard.

The first part of the book is mildly interesting, though astonishingly repetitive. Gray argues that Darwinian science challenged not so much the Biblical Genesis story, but the cherished notion of an afterlife. If, as Darwin argued, we humans are animals like any others, doomed to extinction, what did that imply about life after death - surely the immortal human soul would not be sharing heavenly space with sheep, ants and fleas? Do we continue to evolve after death? The consequence of these apparent conundrums was a pseudo scientific quest to find evidence of the survival of the soul. This was pursued by some obscure Victorian/Edwardian SPR members who hoped that mediums would deliver cross referenced messages from their deceased chums. It's a bizarre, somewhat intriguing story.

It's in the second part of the book, 'God Builders', that I think Gray comes off the rails - and his third part 'Sweet Mortality' reads like a rehash of Bryan Appleyard's book. To be sure, I have always been puzzled by the way Communist regimes have tried to preserve the remains of their dead leaders - and I was hoping for some insights. Instead we get a rambling account of H.G. Wells' visits to the Soviet Union, and his 'third wife' Moura Budberg - Maria Ignatyevna Zakrevskaya - followed by a rehash of some recent scholarship about the Soviet Union.

The life of Moura Budberg is a fascinating story, but I have no idea why Gray included it in this book.

For this reader, Gray's account of some troubling and complex history read like a second hand, barely digested atrocity-cherry picking exercise. Gray is candid about his sources in his notes - and it's interesting he doesn't reference Orlando Figes nuanced masterpiece The Whisperers, nor Timothy Snyder's magisterial 'Bloodlands'. Gray's rather voyeuristic smorgasbord of shootings, hangings and pits full of brain matter - all second hand research - leaves a very sour aftertaste. This is a new kind of atrocity tourism.

I am also fatigued by the exploitation of a kind of historical irony. Of course Stalin preached this, but we all know in reality that he and his henchman did this... This is not genuine historical investigation but fatuous, second hand sniping. And of course, Gray's argument would not be complete without a few 'knowing' nods to the complicity of Karl Marx - or 'Marxian' theory as Gray puts it. I can only say read the new Snyder/Judt book for a more profound and telling insight into the values and limitations of Marx's work. (As I have said before, one can just as easily blame Hegel for the Gulag.)

And what precisely is Gray's point? According to back cover of the Penguin paperback the argument is that 'at the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death.' Huh? Coincidentally I have just read a gripping account of the British West Indies sugar industry - and its gruesome exploitation of African slaves. This hideous genocide was begun by Muslim traders, taken up by the Iberian empires - then the Dutch and English... Was this to do with capitalist greed, or our 'obsession with death'? Or is that just the Soviets?

So - if you seek enlightenment...

The Demjanjuk puzzle

2012-02-09T10:37:00.001+01:00

"We must remind thisold man of what he did. We owe it to the victims and ourselves — otherwise wewould be a people without a memory." Journalist, Die Zeit.

"I believe the Germans didn't want to blow up the case in Jerusalem because they were very happy that for once you had a major war crimes case connected with the Holocaust and the accused was not German. For the first time in history, I think, so much concentration on another nationality was focused by the world media, by the entire international community." Yoram Sheftel, Israeli lawyer

On 30 November, 2009 a 91 year old former UScitizen called John Demjanjuk was wheeled into a court room in Munich. He wasaccused as an ‘accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews’ at the Treblinka andSobibor extermination camps, built in occupied Poland in 1942.

The appearance of this old man in a German courtwas widely hailed a triumph of international justice. Was it?

Seventy years after the Second World War, and thenear destruction of European Jewry, the long search for justice and retributionclimaxed with the trial of a decrepit camp guard. In this book, I will showwhy.

During the 18 month trial, Demjanjuk wasincarcerated in Stadelheim Prison. He occupied a cell once used to detain AdolfHitler when Demjanjuk was three years old. He frequently claimed that he was too unwellto attend court proceedings. When he did, he arrived slumped in a wheelchairpushed by a German police officer. He often seemed to be barely conscious, andfor much of the time lay prone on his back his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. This kind of theatre is of course typical in trials of this kind. The message, of course, is - my client is too old and ill to be tried fairly.

On 12 May, 2011 the Munich court found Demjanjukguilty, as charged. The judges offered him ‘the last word’, but he refused: in fact hehad uttered not a word throughout the trial. Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years inprison – but immediately released pending an appeal. He now resides in a Munichhome for the elderly.

The conclusion of the Munich trial was widelycelebrated as a breakthrough moment. According Efraim Zuroff: "What this conviction does is set a legalprecedent that should pave the way for the prosecution of many people who wereon a daily basis over a prolonged period of time involved in mass murder butwho had been ignored…"

Demjanjuk has hardlybeen ignored – this was his third trial.

So who wasthis man – who has somehow come to stand for the crimes of the Third Reich?

There seems little doubt that the man known to hisCleveland, Ohio neighbours as 'John Demjanjuk' once served as a guard at the Sobiborextermination camp. (This Ivan also served at other camps.) This was one of the ‘Reinhardt Camps’ (or Reinhard) that the Germansbuilt in occupied Poland to complete the liquidation of Polish Jews. Thesecamps were managed by veterans of the German euthanasia programme. The sole purposeof the Reinhardt Camps was to murder many thousands of people as efficiently aspossible. The camps were factories of death. The German officers who had beencharged with this task recruited Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans volunteersas guards, orderlies and so on. These men had been trained at a special campnear the Polish village of Trawniki – and were known as Trawniki Männer.

The role of many of these Trawniki men was to herd the tensof thousands of victims of the German ‘Final Solution’ into the gas chambers. Testimonyby the few survivors of the Reinhardt camps shows beyond any shadow of doubtthat these camp guards, such as the infamous ‘Ivan the Terrible’, weremurderous brutes, who relished their job.

Is it appropriate for one of these guards to becomea symbol of the Holocaust? Very few of the camp managers were ever brought tojustice. And yet the conviction (pending appeal) of a Ukrainian camp guard isregarded as a legal triumph.

The LongRoad to Munich

What is remarkable about the Demjanjuk case is thatthe 2010/11 Munich trial was his third.

We know that Iwan Mykolajowytsch Demjanjuk was born in 1920 near Kievin what was then the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. (Ukraine did not become anindependent nation state until 1991.)

In 1941, after the German invasion of the SovietUnion, Demjanjuk like millions of other Red Army soldiers became a prisoner ofwar. Nearly three million Soviet citizens died in the German camps: one way outwas to volunteer as a soldier, camp guard or ‘helper’ of some sort. This is ishow Demjanjuk ended up at the Trawniki Camp, and, it is alleged began workingas a guard at Sobibor, and possibly other ‘Reinhardt Camps’. Details of hisservice are, of course, contested. When the Germans closed and destroyed the ‘ReinhardtCamps’, Demjanjuk claims that he joined the ‘Vlasov Army’ – commanded byrenegade Russian general Andrei Vlasov. When the war ended in 1945, Demjanjukfled west and found refuge in one of the Displaced Persons’ camps set up by theAllies to deal with millions of refugees. The man who was Ivan Demjanjukdisappeared… He re-emerged as 'John Demjanjuk' years later.

In 1958, Demjanjuk, his wife and baby son hadeventually reached the United States and become American naturalised citizens. ‘John’got a job with Ford in Cleveland. The Demjanjuks lived the Americna Dream… Butin the 1970s, Demjanjuk was implicated in an investigation into anotherTrawniki man – and in 1983, the Israeli government successfully applied to haveDemjanjuk extradited to stand trial in Jerusalem. The case against him hingedon identity. Was the man formerly known as Ivan Demjanjuk a Sobibor camp guardknown as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ who was exceptionally brutal and operated thediesel engines that were used to despatch tens of thousands of victims?

In 1988, the Jerusalem court found Demjanjuk guiltyand sentenced him to death by hanging.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and theopening of the Soviet archives new evidence came to light that undermined thelink between Ivan Demjanjuk and 'Ivan the Terrible'. Israeli defence attorney Yoram Sheftel took on Demjanjuk’s case – risking, as he put it, becoming the most hated man inIsrael – and won.

The court accepted that the real Ivan Grozny wasmore likely to be another Ivan – Ivan Marchenko… On this basis, mistakenidentity, the guilty verdict was overturned – and John Demjanjuk returned tothe United States.

This question of idendity was crucial of course.Ivan the Terrible, whoever he was, was a big fish – Ivan-the-not-so-terriblewas much smaller fry.

But the American Justice Department’s Office ofSpecial Investigations (OSI) did not give up. In 1991, a new civil complaintwas filed accusing Demjanjuk of serving as a guard at Sobibor and other Germancamps, and taking part in ‘round up’ operations in occupied Poland. In 2004,Demjanjuk was stripped of his American citizenship. An immigration judgeordered him to be deported…

Trial of theCentury

But where to? Which nation would take on theDemjanjuk Case… Poland, where the alleged crimes had been committed? Ukraine,where he had been born? Israel (again)? All refused.

As it turned out it was the new unified Germanythat seized the chance to try John Demjanjuk. So after a long and tortuous legalproceeding Demjanjuk was wheeled into that Munich court room in March 2009.

Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Grozny, had become Iwan derSchreckliche.

When Demjanjuk was extradited from the UnitedStates and brought to Germany in 2009, his prosecutors proclaimed this would be‘the trial of the century’. For the first time, one of the agents of the NaziHolocaust could be brought in front of a court as an ‘accessory to massmurder’. This was indeed a legal breakthrough.

In the last decade, the long cherished idea thatGermany had been reborn in 1945 has been exposed as a myth. De-nazification hadbeen a sham. Many Nazi functionaries who had loyally served Adolf Hitlerslipped into prestigious jobs in the Foreign Ministry, the Secret Service (theBND) and of course industry. A cadre of German lawyers made numerous attemptsto prosecute former Nazis who had played a part in the enactment of the ‘FinalSolution’. But they faced a formidable legal barrier. German courts demandedthat the prosecution prove the direct participation of the accused in thekilling of civilians. This meant that even the officers who had commanded theSS murder squads, the Einsatzgruppen could not be convicted unless it was shownincontrovertibly that they had committed murder. This turned out to be analmost impossible legal barrier. It rendered the thousands of so called deskmurders, who had managed the killing from offices in Berlin, immune.

It has also been revealed that when in 1960 AdolfEichmann was tracked down and brought to Jerusalem to face justice, the WestGerman government made a secret deal with the Israelis. In return for varioustrading agreements, it was agreed that the quest for justice would ‘stop withEichmann’. The ‘others’ would be left alone. And by and large they were… AfterEichmann, the only big ‘Holocaust trial’ in Israel was Demjanjuk’s – and he ofcourse was not German.

An accessoryto mass murder

In 2009, seven decades after the end of the war,the German judiciary abandoned this crippling legal constraint. And so JohnDemjanjuk found himself on trial for the third time – in a German court.

As it turned out, Demjanjuk was convicted of being accessory to 28,060 murders even though no evidence was produced that he had committeda single specific crime. He was guilty because he was there – a factcontested, of course, by his defence team. Before the trial commenced, theprosecutors announced they had new evidence which hinged on the critical issueof identity. This turned out to be a KGB summary of an interview with someonecalled Ignat Danlichenko who claimed to be a guard at Sobibor when – allegedly- Demjanjuk was serving at the camp.

Demjanjuk’s lawyers could not cross examineDanlichenko – he died 25 years ago.

Has justice been done? What is the meaning of Demjanjuk's conviction?

Most civilised nations agree that war crimes must be investigated and their perpetrators tried and punished. But the Demjanjuk case raisestroubling issues. At the end of 70 years of abject failure to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice, we end up with the trial of a Ukrainian camp guard. Why?

At the same time that Demjanjuk was on trial in Munich, an elderly German called Martin Sandberger was dying in a very comfortable nursing home in the prosperous German state of Baden-Württemberg. Sandberger was one of the elite 'Doktoren' who served in the German murder squads, the Einsatzgruppen. His unit EG1 rampaged through the Baltic states - and the ambitious Sandberger was assigned the liquidation of the small Jewish community in Estonia. He accomplished this hideous crime with punctilious zeal. After the war, Sandberger was tried and sentenced to a term of imprisonment - but thanks to his influential family was released early. Like other German perpetrators of the 'Final Solution', he enjoyed a prosperous post war career and affluent retirement.

Theo Angelopoulos

2012-01-25T15:04:00.001+01:00

I was stunned to read of the death of the Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos - who was fatally injured crossing a road while shooting a new film. He was struck by a motorcycle ridden by an off duty police officer.

This is surely a cruel turn of fate.

The Guardian has clips here.

I had recently downloaded and watched his 4 hour long masterpiece 'The Travelling Players' ('O Thiassos') which I vividly remembered seeing when it was released back in the last century. I was overwhelmed at the time by the way it used the odyssey of this little theatrical troupe - witnesses and bystanders to the violent flow of history.

It is not an easy film. But I urge you to watch it as a fitting tribute and memorial to an original and probably great film maker. It is, to be sure, slow: composed mainly of long mobile shots that gaze blankly at the cold and bitter landscapes of Greece before and after the Second World War. I remembered the film as being entirely made up of 10 minute travelling shots, but there is more montage than I recalled.

There is nothing corny about the way Angelopoulos presents his theatrical story - the players put on the same drama 'Golfo the Shepherdess' time after time, whichever bleak mountain village they end up performing in... and whoever their audience is that night. There is one especially memorable scene where they perform 'Golfo' on a wintry beach for a platoon of British soldiers, until they are interrupted by gunfire. The forces of history act on the stage rather than the other way round. It's the antithesis of Visconti's 'Senso' for example - where Verdi appears to be shaping events beyond the proscenium.

The action slips back and forth across a fractured historical landscape - from the time of the Metaxas dictatorship in the 1930s, through the war with Italy and the catastrophic German occupation - and the shabby British efforts to prop up the monarchy and destroy the Communists.

You have to pay attention because Angelopoulos does not provide many obvious signposts. Time is slippery, elusive. The players are somehow part of history, but detached from it. We often come upon them passing warily through the background or margins of a street demonstration or confrontation. They appear to embody the eternal, set against the contingency of mere events.

Few directors have made the long, wide shot so expressive. Angelopoulos tends to eschew character building close ups - his camera stands back, and refuses to give in to conventional film grammar. He insists on the ensemble, the place of the drama...

It can be frustrating. But there is a wonderful moment - among many - when we see the players, shot from a high, oblique position, gathering, suitcases in hand on a winding mountain road. You sense the raw cold and the hard travelling that lies ahead. But as a folk song clatters into life, the players dance away into the distance. It's as thrilling as any sequence in a Minnelli musical.

The story we follow mimics Greek drama with the different characters standing for Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes and so on... It is not essential to know you are watching a modern version of an ancient drama but this subtle and complex mirroring and doubling of the narrative is the key to understanding, and enjoying, 'The Travelling Players'.

When we mourn this exceptional artist, let's remember that he stubbornly spoke from the left - from a perspective that had understood the way Greece had been ravaged and mutilated by the Axis Powers:

"This is an emergency situation. We must realize this. So we must all examine what can be done - the left and right. This is my plea... I remain a leftist in total confusion. I am afraid of what tomorrow will bring."

Darwin's bassoon

2012-01-25T09:51:00.000+01:00

Bassoon virtuoso David Robson sent me this intriguing picture of a room at Down House, once the home of Charles Darwin.

Close to the centre of frame - a bassoon...

Was Darwin a bassoon player? And if so, did this impact on his thinking?

It turns out that this is a question well worth asking. I entered /bassoon/ into the online Complete Works of Charles Darwin search box here - and came up with the following intriguing results:

'Worms do not possess any sense of hearing. They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts, if care was taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet....'

Disappointing for admirers of the bassoon, perhaps... but Darwin goes on:

'Although they are indifferent to undulations in the air audible by us, they are extremely sensitive to vibrations in any solid object. When the pots containing two worms which had remained quite indifferent to the sound of the piano, were placed on this instrument, and the note C in the bass clef was struck, both instantly retreated into their burrows. After a time they emerged, and when G above the line in the treble clef was struck they again retreated. Under similar circumstances on another night one worm dashed into its burrow on a very high note being struck only once, and the other worm when C in the treble clef was struck. On these occasions the worms were not touching the sides of the pots, which stood in saucers; so that the vibrations, before reaching their bodies, had to pass from the sounding board of the piano, through the saucer, the bottom of the pot and the damp, not very compact earth on which they lay with their tails in their burrows. They often showed their sensitiveness when the pot in which they lived, or the table on which the pot stood, was accidentally and lightly struck; but they appeared less sensitive to such jars than to the vibrations of the piano; and their sensitiveness to jars varied much at different times. It has often been said that if the ground is beaten or otherwise made to tremble, worms believe that they are pursued by a mole and leave their burrows. I beat the ground in many places where worms abounded, but not one emerged. When, however, the ground is dug with a fork and is violently disturbed beneath a worm, it will often crawl quickly out of its burrow.'

(Darwin, C. R. 1881. The formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms, with observations on their habits. London: John Murray.)

Darwin's fascination with the life and habits of the earthworm are, of course, legendary. But I confess that I had not imagined him carrying out experiments like these, using this little domestic orchestra, to ascertain the creature's musicality.

Nevertheless, this charming story reminds us yet again that Darwin's profound investigations of the natural world was not just rigorous but imaginative as well. How I wonder does the worm's sensitivity to tuned vibrations fit with his general theory - and was that by any chance a tuning fork in the last sentence?

"Wandering Jew" the Search for Joseph Roth

2012-01-23T10:41:00.000+01:00

I spent most of Sunday reading Dennis Marks' engrossing new book about the novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, 'Wandering Jew'.

This is one of a series of 'essays' beautifully published by Notting Hill Editions. BBC 4 documentaries have turned the idea of a journey in search of someone or other into a cliche - but Marks' pursuit of the enigmatic Roth is a subtle critique of the quest narrative. The first sentence of 'Wandering Jew' is 'He keeps disappearing' - and might also have been the last sentence. In the course of Marks' wanderings across the haunted landscapes of the long vanished Habsburg empire, Roth and his work shimmers in fascinating detail - but forever eludes capture, like a face passing across a shattered mirror. Occasionally, Marks seems to stumble on Roth's traces in some shabby backwater of a lost world, but then the image quivers and is gone. It is in this elusive way that Roth reflects - and reflects on - the enigma of Mitteleuropa: his spiritual landscape.

Roth was born somewhere near Brody is what is now the modern Republic of Ukraine. As Marks points out, in Russian U kraina means 'at the border' - and the border of the border, if you like, is the phantom region known as Galicia, now split between Poland and Ukraine. This was Roth's homeland, but it was one that offered no security of identity - which is the obsessive theme of Roth's work and journalism. The Galician puzzle is lucidly analysed in 'Wandering Jew' - and I know doing this is no easy task. I spent a great deal of time puzzling over why SS chief Heinrich Himmler insisted on calling a military division of Ukrainian collaborators the 'Galizien', and forbade any reference to 'Ukrainians'. The reason was that 'Galicia' was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and according to German 'race scientists', 'Galicians' were sufficiently 'Germanised' to permit recruitment by the elite SS. The idea of 'Galicians' was a chimera.

In medieval times, there was a short lived Kingdom of Galicia - but for many centuries, the violent tides of competing empires washed back and forth over Galicia creating a kind of phantom territorial entity. Because of its connections to the Austrian imperial hub in Vienna, Galicia became the crucible of Ukrainian nationalism. But consider - as Marks does - the name of the regional capital: today it is L'viv - as it was in 1918, during the time of the short-lived Ukrainian republic. Before that it was Austrian Lemberg; an even older name is the Polish Lwow, which the city adopted again after Galicia was incorporated into Poland after the First World War. After 1941, Galicia became part of the German 'General Government' and L'viv was reassigned its old Habsburg identity of Lemberg. After the German invasion for the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941 the city was the site of a pogrom carried out by German troops and a Ukrainian militia called the 'Nachtigall'...

What Marks reveals in his richly detailed essay is the way in which Joseph Roth, as writer and journalist, was shaped by the these enigmatic and violent borderlands - and mined his experience to create a series of fictional meditations on the fractal nature of 'nation' and 'national identity'. As a Jew, born into on the edge of the multi ethnic Hapsburg Empire and educated in a German school and Austrian university Roth understood these destructive identities and both fractal and illusory - he was preoccupied with the uncertainty principle of 20th Century allegiance. Roth insisted, for example, that Austria 'is neither a state, a home, nor a nation...' He described himself as 'extra-territorial', 'supra national.' Marks shows that this led Roth to reject Zionism: 'Given all the millennial grief of the Jews, they still had one consolation: the fact that they didn't have such a fatherland...at a time when the whole world launched itself into patriotic madness...'

Roth died in 1939 in Paris. He did not live to see the horrors of unbridled nationalism that engulfed his fugitive homeland - the bloodlands of the 20th Century. We need his scepticism and refusal to be nailed down to some destructive mythology - always.

Wannsee

2012-01-20T13:58:00.001+01:00

70 years ago, German bureaucrats and civil servants gathered at a villa on the edge of Lake Wannsee near Berlin. The matter they discussed was the most abysmal crime of the 20th Century: the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem'. We can be sure these gentleman arrived punctually - and then proceeded to discuss their hideous business with due thoroughness. If you visit the superb Wannsee Villa memorial museum today, you can gaze on the faces of these men - and wonder about the nature of human evil.

I find it impossible to arrive at Wannsee on the Berlin S Bahn without thinking of what took place in that villa - and find the sight of happy, wealthy people cavorting on the Wannsee beaches today disquieting.

It is sometimes assumed that the German 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem' was conceived or inaugurated at the Wannsee Conference. Not so. Germans and their collaborators had been systematically murdering Jews since the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. Arguably, Hitler had been advocating a 'radical solution' of 'their' Jewish problem to puppet and allied leaders such as the Croatian Ante Pavelic, the Hungarian Admiral Horthy and Romanian Ion Antonescu months before 'Operation Barbarossa'. Strictly speaking, historians remain uncertain about precisely when a decision was made to murder European Jewry - and there is no paper trail leading back to Hitler himself, no 'Hitler Order'. I often wonder how useful this debate about the when and who really is - the reports of the SD Task Forces, the Einsatzgruppen make clear that these murder squads began liquidating Jews and Bolsheviks (often viewed as the same 'enemy') as soon as the German panzers rolled over the Soviet border.

So what was the purpose of Wannsee? By the end of 1941, Germany had conquered and occupied a huge swathe of Western and Eastern Europe. In the minds of the racially obsessed Hitler and his paladins, this magnified the so called 'Jewish problem'. Now millions, not just hundreds of thousands of Jews had somehow to be dealt with - mass murder had become, as it always does, a problem of bureaucratic enactment. The conference was called by the SD/RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich in December 1941 - but was delayed until the end of the January the following year. Heydrich was SS chief Heinrich Himmler's subordinate and deputy - and the men he called to Wannsee were mid level bureaucrats. Taking the minutes - that obsequious manager of mass murder, Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann's record of the Wannsee Conference (the Wannsee Protokol) does not refer to liquidation, extermination or killing. Instead, the Wannsee bureaucrats mainly talk about evacuation - or evacuation to the East. The question Heydrich wanted them to answer was - how can we manage this evacuation process? The slaughter of European Jews had to be conducted as efficiently and punctiliously as possible. In Croatia and Romania, Heydrich knew, the mass murder of Jews conducted by Croatian and Romanian killers had been much too messy - lacking in Order. As Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer and governor of occupied Poland (the General Government) put it - Germans performed surgery, not butchery. (A meaningless distinction to the hundreds of thousands humiliated and murdered in muddy Eastern European execution pits...)

We can be sure that Heydrich's bureaucrats understood that evacuation meant murder - and on an unprecedented scale. We can say that because one of the SD officers Heydrich invited was Dr. Rudolf Lange - who had presided over the destruction of Latvian Jews, which reached a hideous climax at Rumbula near Riga. Even without Lange's presence, it is impossible to conceive that these desk men at the heart of the German state knew nothing about the crimes that had already been committed in Eastern Europe.

As we look at the faces and records of these German civil servants displayed at the Wannsee Villa today, there is much to reflect on... These men were not thuggish brutes: like many Einsatzgruppen officers they had doctorates from the top German universities. They war experts of a sort - who appear to have set about the task with relish. In January, 1942 - seventy years ago - these gentleman had no reason to fear that Germany might lose its 'war of annihilation' - or that they would face retribution for 'managing genocide'.

Germany was defeated - but about retribution, they were right. Only a very few of the Wannsee bureaucrats was ever investigated and punished for plotting the destruction of millions of lives. Most disappeared into the bureaucracy of West Germany, where they continued their punctilious careers.

Balfour Declaration

2012-01-18T15:31:00.001+01:00

I have just finished Jonathan Schneer's outstanding book 'The Balfour Declaration: the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict'.

It is an engrossing, revelatory read.

It is, of course, well known that in the course of the First World War the British government made rash, contradictory promises to both Arabs and Zionist Jews. Schneer's book tells us why this happened in riveting detail and concludes that 'Britain and her Allies slew the Ottoman dragon in the Middle East. By these policies they sowed the dragon's teeth. Armed men rose up from the ground. They are rising still.'

The British government published the Balfour Declaration on 9 November, 1917. Just 67 words, it was the distillation of debate, argument and sheer happenstance:

Foreign Office 
November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely, 
Arthur James Balfour

Arguably, this famous document shaped the violent history of the Middle East.

But the Declaration contains some subtly worded caveats: it refers not to a nation state as such but 'a national home for the Jewish people'; it insists that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine'... The final clause - about the rights and political status of 'Jews in any other country' - reflected fears that the establishment of a 'national home' could conceivably provoke other governments to deprive Jews of hard won rights of citizenship.

At a meeting held on 2 December at the London Opera House on Old Kingsway, Lord Rothschild informed an ecstatic audience that 'We are met on the most momentous occasion in the history of Judaism for the last 1800 years...' And it is true that British Zionists, led by the brilliant and charismatic Chaim Weizmann, had worked long and hard to get a Great Power - as Britain was in 1917 - to back their cause.

Or appear to back their cause... for nothing was quite what it seemed. The key to unlocking the mystery of the Balfour Declaration is the Ottoman Empire, which encompassed the still bitterly contested region between the Mediterranean and Persia. Germany had long wooed the Caliphate and then the 'Young Turks' who deposed the last traditional Ottoman ruler. In 1914, Turkey allied with Germany against the Entente Powers - and the Grand Mufti of Constantinople proclaimed Jihad against the enemy's of Germany. Everything follows from this moment.

All the actors in the drama that culminated a succession of dramatic events in the last two years of the Great War had very little idea of the complex game being played by their British friends and their French allies. Also present at the Opera House that momentous night was an assistant secretary to Prime Minister Lloyd George's War Cabinet - Sir Mark Sykes. His name will no doubt be familiar. For as well as advising and backing the British Zionists, Sykes was also the co author of the 'Sykes-Picot Agreement' which proposed dismembering the flayed relics of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East between the Entente Powers Great Britain and France, with the connivance of the Russian Tsarist government. As part of this secret agreement, Sykes and other British 'Easterners' like T.E. Lawrence had promised nationhood of a very ambiguous sort to Arab nationalists (of a sort) led by Emir Hussein of Mecca, a direct descendant of the Prophet. It was Hussein and his sons Faisal and Abdullah led the Arab Revolt against the Turkish masters of the Middle East, under the tutelage of Lawrence.

As the Arab armies pushed north towards Damascus, King Hussein knew nothing of the 'Balfour Declaration'; in London, Weizmann and his circle likewise had no idea that the British had also backed an Arab state, which would encompass at least part of Palestine - the longed for Jewish national home. In fact, the British pro Arab party in Cairo had deliberately misled Hussein concerning the boundaries of his future Arab state. In any case, the British and French expected to wield significant controlling power in the old Ottoman territories, assuming Germany was defeated, as they already did in Egypt. And none of these parties knew that British agents and diplomats had simultaneously been meeting with disaffected Turkish leaders in an effort to lever the Turks out of the war...

Clearly British tactics and policy were devious, sly - and ultimately destructive. But why? States do not act for moral reasons - they are driven by self interest, however much they might proclaim the opposite. Schneer's book unravels the political drives that led to the Balfour Declaration, and the dragons' teeth it sowed, in very compelling detail. At the heart of the matter was the Ottoman Empire - which had been decaying for at least a century. The fate of this vast and dilapidated empire had long preoccupied the European powers - half a century earlier, Britain and France had gone to war to prevent Tsarist Russia getting her hands on strategic Ottoman territories. Now at the beginning of the first truly global conflict, Russia was an Entente ally - and the 'Young Turks' who had ousted the old Caliphate were allied to Germany.

As it still does today, the pointless slaughter of the Western Front dominated perceptions of the war. And in 1917, that ghastly struggle remained stalemated. The British government, led by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, were in desperate straights. Since 1914, so called 'Easterners' like Sir Mark Sykes had pressed for greater investment in the war against Germany's Turkish ally. As the war looked increasingly hard to win in the trenches of Flanders, this option began to look more attractive. But given the cost of waging war on another front, why not use a surrogate force to attack the Turks from behind. Result - the Arab Revolt. To push Arab leaders like Sharif Hussein of Mecca to take up arms against a well armed if insecure superpower, British 'Easterners' based in Cairo made all kinds of seductive promises to the Arab leaders, knowing very well that they had already connived with the French to carve up the Ottoman carcass, even before it had expired.

I have always been intrigued by the emergence of the idea of nationalism in the various European Empires the landscape dominated of 19th Century political history. In Western europe, the Habsburg and Russian Empires dominated pre existing former national entities. It was not difficult for the leaders of new nationalist movements to imagine a future restored Poland, or Romania or even Latvia. But in the Ottoman lands, such latent national states did not exist. Palestine, Syria, Arabia... these were all provinces of the Ottoman Empire occupied mainly by Muslim Arabs as well as Christians and Jews. So these indigenous people were not strictly speaking 'Syrians' or 'Palestinians': a province is a much weaker entity than a former nation state like Poland. What could nationalism mean to the Arab subjects of the Ottomans? Was the solution Pan Arabism, under a Muslim leadership - or the re-invention of the Ottoman provinces as nations?

This innate enfeeblement of Arab nationalism gave Chaim Weizmann and his colleagues a tremendous advantage - for Zionism was a mature nationalist movement. Zionists conceived the Holy Land as a future Jewish nation - or national home as the authors of the Balfour Declaration expressed the idea.

The Zionists had another strategic advantage. One of the revelations of Schneer's account is that many British power brokers in Lloyd George's cabinet and the Foreign Office believed in the hoary old myth of an 'International Jewry' that wielded a secretive global power. This myth, that Jews exert a magical influence over finance and politics had tragic consequences. Between the wars, the idea of this all powerful World Jewry evolved into the myth of the 'Jewish-Bolshevik' who somehow planned world revolution while the Jewish manipulators of Wall Street sought to dominate the capitalist world. This nonsense persists today in the pseudo liberal obsession with an all powerful American 'Jewish lobby'. (Of course there are American Jewish lobby groups, which have starkly different aims - but then so too is there a car manufacturers' lobby...)

So in 1917, it appears that an older, slightly more genteel version of this anti-Semitic fantasy pervaded the corridors of power in Whitehall. Lloyd George and his cabinet - many of whom disdained their Jewish friends and allies - concluded that they needed this 'Jewish power' to win the war - especially if it could be used to persuade American President Woodrow Wilson to enter the war on the side of the Allies. (They did, of course, but not because of any mysterious Jewish lobby group.)

It has to be said the Weizmann - who was a brilliant chemist contributing to the British war effort - played up to this idea of a powerful 'International Jewry'. He warned the British that Germany might also make a play for Zionist support - what then?

Schneer makes very clear that not all Jews supported the Zionists. Many thoughtful British Jews, like Weizmann's great rival Lucien Wolf, fervently believed that they must pursue the path of full assimilation. Rightly, they pointed out that Jews had made a special contribution to western culture and, they hoped, would eventually escape the destructive prejudices of the anti-Semites. Zionists argued that anti-Semitism - on the contrary - was not diminishing but intensifying. They pointed to the Dreyfus Affair and the worsening persecution of Jews in Tsarist Russia. Wolf's position as a Jewish anti-Zionist was weakened by Britain's war time bond with Russia - the worst of all persecutors and murderers of Jews.

In 1917, Germany entrained Lenin to the Finland Station in Moscow and = the rest is history: revolution engulfed Britain's Tsarist ally and the new Bolshevik government sued for peace with Germany. It is easy to forget that after the Russian Revolution, Germany won the war in the East - her armies swept into the Baltic and Ukraine. From the point of view of the British, German victory began to look increasingly likely - hence the desperate need to get the Americans on side and the Turks on the run... To achieve this, it was vital to draw in both the Zionists... and the Arabs.

It is an irony that the Balfour Declaration, a landmark in Zionist history, came about not because of the mythical power of Jewry - but because of devious British machinations designed to achieve victory against Germany - the nation that twenty years later perpetrated the worst genocide in human history.

The survivors of that abysmal crime then fought the British - to secure a nation state in Palestine.

Im Himmel, unter der Erde

2012-01-10T10:15:00.002+01:00

I have recently watched a German documentary Im Himmel, under der Erde - In Heaven, Underground. It's about the old Jewish cemetery on the edge of Berlin in Wiessensee. Made by Britta Wauer, the documentary is certainly worthy and exhaustive. The film unfolds without narration, though is rather spoilt by some schmaltzy - and specially composed - music.

Worthy, well meaning... to be sure. Why then did 'Im Himmel' leave an aftertaste of disquiet? It's perplexing - but I've concluded that the only way I can sum up this anxiety is that this is a film about German Jewish historical experience, made for Germans who want a feel good experience about their history.

I'm afraid it reminded me of Stanley Kubrick's comment about 'Schindler's List' - that it provided the Holocaust with a happy ending.

What Wauer's film inadvertently demonstrates is that Germans have sought redemption in the Jewish experience: they have appropriated this experience in Protestant redemptive terms. Although the film features interviews and sequences with German Jews, their life stories serve this other, perhaps unconscious purpose. So we have the policeman who has immersed himself in Jewish religious custom, the Bundeswehr unit that repairs graves and so on...

It reminded me of an encounter with a German motorcycle gang that maintains memorials on the roads between Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. Somehow the statement of contrition is more meaningful than the commemorated victims.

Well I suppose there is nothing wrong with seeking redemption. But Jewish experience cannot be used as an exhibition or show to reconcile others with their past.

There are two other troubling aspects I would highlight in this documentary. Wauer appears to be obsessed with the big monumental tombs in the Wiessensee cemetery. Her camera returns again and again to these edifices.

But you can see opulent monuments like this in any Christian Berlin Friedhof (or at Highgate for that matter) - they are not, as the documentary appears to imply, uniquely 'Jewish'. At one point in the film, the recently restored decoration on one of these tombs is even described by the off screen interviewer as 'kitsch'.

It is right to emphasise the deep history of Jews in Germany - the subject of Amos Elon's book 'The Pity of it All' and how that is reflected at Weissensee. But the contribution of German Jews to German culture society and culture was not just, surely it goes without saying, a matter of money, as this film sometimes seems to imply.

By stressing the long historical symbiosis of Germans and Jews, the documentary fails to acknowledge or even register the violent rupture of the Holocaust: it simply happens. Jewish history cannot be reduced to genocide - but this pivotal catastrophe should not merely be an episode. For many Germans, long before 1933, assimilated German Jews could never be 'Germans' - however many Jews sacrificed their lives for the Fatherland. While the Jews of Berlin memorialised their fallen co-religionists, other Germans talked of the 'stab in the back' - that Jews had somehow caused Germany's defeat in 1918. In Wauer's documentary, there is a calm progression through time, all bathed in this lush music score, so that the destruction of European Jewry becomes merely an episode. The documentary emphasises the continuities in Berlin Jewish experience - and we end up with a travesty.

An honorable, worthy film - but one that sheds historical responsibility too easily.

Berlin attack

2012-01-08T10:31:00.000+01:00

I haven't felt like blogging for some - and here's why.

At 3pm on New Year's Eve I was violently assault in Berlin - on Wienerstrasse in Kreuzberg to be exact. Visitors to Berlin may not be aware that the atmosphere at New Year - Silvester as it's called in Germany - is thick with smoke from fireworks and a barely repressed aggression. Hand crackers are thrown throughout the day, and an artillery barrage is unleashed all night. This is what happened to me. I had cycled through the smoke and twilight to a newspaper shop near Gurlitzer Bahnhof to buy The Guardian and Financial Times - excellent arts pages. As I made my way back, fireworks detonating everywhere, someone threw at least two of these firecrackers into my front wheel. Believe me, these cursed toys are LOUD. Shocked I stopped, and exclaimed 'What the **!' or words to that effect. I was aware of a laughing, stockily built young man with dirty blond air and pasty skin standing a few metres away. Bellowing, this fellow quite suddenly launched himself at me - his fists windmilling in the air. The assault was brutal - but as sometimes happens in extreme circumstances a shard of consciousness detached itself and watched as it were from above. I was hurled across the bonnet of a car, continuously battered by this gentleman's whirling fists, then found myself descending into the gutter. Where was my bicycle? My detached observing self wondered what the outcome of this attack might be - hospitalisation at the very least. This psychopath appeared to be deliberately aiming his blitzkrieg at the side of my head, but I was also imagining lost teeth. Time was suspended in a blur - though, oddly, not of pain.

Then I became aware that a number of other people had begun restraining the attacker - successfully as it turned out. The sequence of events feels compressed in my memory, but somehow I made my escape. I was able to ask a few local oddballs if they had seen what had happened - they denied seeing anything. I cycled home furiously, still clutching my papers I should mention. We then called the police, who called an ambulance. My state of mind can be imagined - physically I was battered but not severely injured. The ambulance guys offered to take me to A&E - but getting an x ray and so on would have taken at least three hours. I spent the rest of the weekend in an agoraphobic state - under a cushion of ice cubes. I have spent the last week recovering.

My biggest fear was a kind of post traumatic reaction... flashbacks... anger and so on. So far reactions have been muted. I do occasionally think - why did I stop? Well, I did. It was bad luck that the firecracker man was a psychopath on a hair trigger. The police have taken a report, but nothing more. I could certainly identify the dangerous criminal maniac who attacked me...

Had this happened to a German visitor to London, we can imagine Speigel or Bild taking up the hoary old story of Brits hating Germans. I was riding a British made bicycle and clutching The Guardian. Was this provocative? I doubt it. It was bad luck - and the superstitious among you can think that it ended the year rather than inaugurated 2012.

As to Silvester in Berlin - never again. It's a horror show.

A mysterious German made machine

2011-12-22T09:19:00.003+01:00

If there's one thing more boring than Eurseptic Brits bleating about a Fourth Reich, it's German journalists churning out the same piece of drivel year in year out about how much we are supposed to fear/resent/envy Germans and Germany. It's a weird kind of self flattery, of course - and yoked to the usual references to Britain's loss of empire etc etc etc...

Is there a clever bit of technology that regurgitates this article and drops in a few up to date references? Certainly sounds like it... Doesn't Marco Evers have anything better to do?

I agree that the British obsession with the Second World War - the so called Hitlerization of the school curriculum for example - is infantile. Last year I bumped into a 'Third Reich Tour' of Berlin: people obsessively interested in Eva Braun and such like... Come on - get a life!

German commentators have rather ingeniously made talking about the 'Second World War' an embarrassment - as if we were all Basil Fawlty's staggering out of NHS hospitals with bandages wrapped round our heads and offending any passing German. (Germans are, of course, loved all over Greece, Germany, Holland and France...)

What this trickery sidesteps is the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust - do Germans want us to stop trying to understand why and how the worst genocide in history was committed by an advanced European nation, with the compliance of hundreds of thousands of its citizens?

Do they want us to forget too that in the period after the war, thousands of former murderers took leading roles in the construction of a prosperous new West Germany? That people who had devotedly searched Hitler became top dogs in business, the secret service and the Foreign Ministry? These matters have all recently been reported in Spiegel - few British journalists have picked up on their implications.

Turin Shroud ---- North Korea

2011-12-20T15:04:00.000+01:00

Is it possible, as a group of Italian scientists suggest, that the supposedly inexplicable marks on the Turin Shroud were produced by a flash of electro-magnetic energy at the moment Christ was resurrected?

With regard to another supernatural matter, why do Communist societies obsess about the physical remains of deceased dictators? First Lenin - now Kim Jong-il. What links Communism an allegedly a god denying ideology with a political culture of mausoleums and revered corpses?

Simple answer - I don't know. Longer answer - David Hume, you should be living at this hour. Remember the Essay on Miracles? Here is Hume's key argument, which Nicholas Humphrey used so effectively in 'Is There Anybody There?' (channel 4, 1987):

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention) "That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish... When any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

In the case of the Turin Shroud, which of the following propositions is the 'greater miracle':

1. That the marks on the shroud were produced by a discharge of energy - and that this discharge was in some unspecified way attendant upon the resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ, a first century Jewish prophet regarded as the Son of God?

2. That persons unknown manufactured the marks, or that they were caused by some other accidental as yet unidentified process?

It would be hard to deny the accolade to No 1 - especially since it embodies more than one miraculous event: it requires us to accept the special supernatural status of Christ, the possibility of resurrection from the dead - and that a resurrection event is accompanied by a discharge of EM energy.

So... I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle.

It is a grotesque waste of scientific resources and what have you to spend any more time analysing the cursed Turin Shroud.

Likewise, the funereal practices of atheist Communist societies have always generated overtones of the miraculous. It started with Lenin, whose Mausoleum still dominates Red Square and allegedly still enshrines his embalmed corpse - and continues today with the revered Kim Jong-Il, whose son now assumes dictatorial control of this miserable and brutal nation.

Why do Communist regimes sanctify and pickle their dead leaders? It appears that when V.I. Lenin joined the choir celestial in January 1924, the Soviet government was bombarded by thousands of citizens' letters pleading for the preservation of his corpse. If this story is believable, it implies that the most progressive political theory of modern times was itself pickled early on by superstitious beliefs older than Christianity in any of its manifestations.

Any ideas why?

So farewell then...

2011-12-19T10:12:00.002+01:00

... Kim Jong-il, Christopher Hitchens and the second series of The Killing.

The final episode of The Killing was wonderfully entertaining and gripping - and riddled with inconsistencies. Surely the great skill of the screen writer is to drive the narrative across these rifts of inconsistency? Or is that simply that Sarah Lund is so captivating?

There has been a great mourning chorus for Christopher Hitchens, who may now be beatified in a way that he might not have admired. He was often a brilliant writer, but his lurch to the right by backing Bush and the war in Iraq (and hobnobbing with the neo-cons) was and is unforgivable. Here's a simple point: Hitchens claimed that opposing that dishonest destructive war implied condoning Saddam Hussein's dictatorship and backing 'Islamofascism'. He was wrong.

What hasn't been noted is that Hitchens belonged to a uniquely English cadre of intellectuals. They are the products of public school and Oxbridge and dominate the leftist chattering classes through organs like the New Statesman. As privileged young men they fly the flag of Trotskyism - in plump middle age they lurch towards reaction. In Hitchens' case, this pattern was complicated by his conversion to atheism - and to be sure God is Not Great is a terrific read, though at one point contaminated by a bizarrely anti-Semitic diatribe against circumcision.

History however has shown that the second Iraq war and its concomitant campaign in Afghanistan have been unmitigated catastrophes - and in this case, Hitchens got it very wrong indeed. I don't think Hitchen's model George Orwell ever made the same kind of mistake.

Small world - updated

2011-12-17T10:08:00.001+01:00

I have been reading Now All Roads Lead to France a new book by Matthew Hollis about the poet Edward Thomas which has received very good reviews.

But I am not yet convinced that this book needed to be written.

It's a biography that appears shy about being a biography - and hovers frustratingly between a portrait of an age and a life story. It contains far too many reviews of reviews by long forgotten Edwardian bores.

And what bores some of these people were - I defy you to read the work of Lascelles Abercrombie without succumbing to terminal depression, or fits of wild laughter.

This is what Edwardian culture produced when RW Rilke was writing the Duino Elegies!

The main problem is that Thomas is simply not a big enough literary figure - and the book as a consequence locates the few giants of the period on the sidelines: I mean Yeats and Pound.

Thomas wrote a handful of good poems and two or three great ones - see below. Through no fault of his own he was killed in 1915, and his poetry has been overshadowed by the brilliance of Wilfred Owen and the genius of Isaac Rosenberg. It's Rosenberg above all who reaches out beyond the triteness of Edwardian

Whether intentionally or not, in Hollis's book Thomas is a not terribly attractive figure - a self obsessed, overworked and desperate hack, who abused his wife and family. A friendship with the American Robert Frost pushed him towards a new kind of poetics that was snuffed out by the detonation of a passing shell.

There was probably a short concise account to be written about Thomas's encounters with Frost - which seems to be the centre of Hollis's book - but this is absurdly over egged.

What Now All Roads Lead to France does reveal is how parochial and small minded English literature had become in the Edwardian period - and that this decayed culture got a terrific shot in the arm from the carnage of the First World War.

This was the world that Ezra Pound shook up - and needed to shake up... Pound's later conversion to Fascism and grotesque anti-Semitism notwithstanding, before 1925 he and Yeats were the solitary literary giants of the age.

For some reason poetry - surely the great English literary art - went into hibernation after the passing of the Romantics, stirred briefly into life by Browning and Tennyson when he was writing 'In Memorian' (forget the rest).

Somehow we end up with the fatuous Rupert Brooke. What was it about this period that sapped the life blood of poetry, while the novel went from peak to higher peak?

We have idea how Thomas might have developed if he had not been killed, whether he would have reached the level of an Owen or Rosenberg. But this one magnificent poem implies he might have done.

RAIN

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me,
disappoint.

French rattle sabres

2011-12-17T09:15:00.002+01:00

The escalating spat between the French and British governments is surely of great interest.

While German chancellor Angela Merkel holds out an olive branch to Cameron, various French bankers and ministers are lining up to throw merde at our credit rating. This is all to do with a threatened credit downgrade for the French, but has deep historical roots.

Merkel's mercy versus Sarkozy's brace of insults takes us back to the dawn of the 19th Century - when French or Napoleonic hegemony has reduced even Prussian to vassal status. Bonaparte himself rides in triumph through the Brandenburg Gate and down Unter den Linden. French conquest, which was cultural as well as military and political, had a profound influence on the emergence of German romantic nationalism - which was and perhaps is fuelled by hatred of the French. Bismarck, of course, used a war with France to unify Germany in 1871 - and France was the main target of German aggression in 1914 and then again in 1940. No change there then...

Allegedly Merkel and Sarkozy can't stand each other - he comments on her failed diets while she dislikes being kissed and embraced. But Merkozy is also riven by history - which makes Cameron's position an intriguing one.

I suspect that British reverence for France is quite shallow - and we have much deeper connections to the Germans, who shaped the deeper levels of our language and ancestry. So contra the morons of UKIP and the Tory Euroseptics (sic) - why not seize the historic opportunity to repair an old friendship?

The Moron's Party

2011-12-12T08:26:00.000+01:00

So here they are then - the idiots who are hauling Britain into history's cess pit. The one on the right is Aidan Burley, MP for Cannock Chase who enjoys stag parties in the French Alps, that according to his own Twitter requires him to "deeply regret inappropriate behaviour by some guests at a stag party" he attended and was "extremely sorry for any offence that was caused."

Too late now Aidan, old bean. Let's hope the French authorities do prosecute you for 'Anti-semitic and pro-Nazi crimes' as they may be entitled to do...

Burley's crocodile tears are shed for alleged antics all too symptomatic of the kind of people who attend our great public schools and become Tory MPs. According to this report, it involved donning SS uniforms, goading waiters, shouting such gems as "This man is a Tory MP. He went to Oxford as well. A Tory boy. He was the candidate for Berlin East."

I live in 'East' Berlin and know the kind of contempt felt by many Germans for Brits - well Aidan you've made very sure that we deserve their contempt.

Allegedly Burley and his pals bellowed "Mein Fuhrer! Mein Fuhrer! Mein Fuhrer!", "Himmler! Himmler! Himmler!" and "Eichmann! Eichmann! Eichmann!"

According to his official web site Aidan 'asked the people of Cannock Chase to Back Burley. I am now going to return that vote of trust by working flat out, backing Cannock Chase and working for local people.'

So I wonder if your constituents enjoyed reading about your expensive Nazi themed party in the Alps? The fact is - you shamed us all.

Memorial to the future

2011-12-10T16:19:00.001+01:00

I was not wrong in calling the Cameron coalition eye-wateringly stupid. If you have tears left for our nation shed them now - Cameron's petulant veto in Brussels has consigned Britain to the dustbin of history.

Why? Well Cameron was not acting on 'our' behalf or even for the City types who engineered the ongoing financial meltdown.

Cameron used his veto - a dim wit's strategy, not deployed even by his predecessors M. Thatcher & J. Major - for his own mentally handicapped class.

I mean the Tory party idiotcracy from the Shires, who are not just re-fighting the Battle of Britain but god knows what imperial conflict from our murky past. They call themselves Eurosceptics these days, but believe you me they are dangerous political dinosaurs, with the brain power to match.

Whatever the sycophantic Nick Clegg says, this is the constituency that counts for Cameron - not us dumb schmuck voters who endure the gruesome economic policies of George Osbourne.

I was reminded of a poem written by a truly brave man (not one of these clubland armchair generals) Keith Douglas, when he was serving in Tunisia in 1943. It is called Aristocrats:

"I Think I Am Becoming A God"

The noble horse with courage in his eye,
clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst:
away fly the images of the shires
but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.
Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88;
it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance.
I saw him crawling on the sand, he said
It's most unfair, they've shot my foot off.

How can I live among this gentle
obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?
Unicorns, almost,
for they are fading into two legends
in which their stupidity and chivalry
are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.
These plains were their cricket pitch
and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences
brought down some of the runners. Here then
under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,
I think with their famous unconcern.
It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.

What does music mean?

2011-12-07T09:16:00.001+01:00

I have often wondered what music means - what does it say? Does the experience of a piece of music necessarily mean or say anything in the way that we think a novel or movie does? Is a symphony 'about something'? Messages are sent by Western Union Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood mogul once said - and perhaps music is an emotional rhetoric. I don't have the skills to peer under the bonnet of say Arnold Schoenberg's 'Transfigured Night' (inspired by Richard Dehmel's poem) and work out its highly complex use of harmony and so on - but nevertheless even for a musical ignoramus the experience of the music is analogous to an emotional journey, a traversal of a region of peaks and toughs, climaxes, falling aways, varying intensities and unconsciously experienced harmonic transfigurations. The title of the Schoenberg piece refers of course to Dehmel's extra-musical narrative: but it's one that I would need to mug up on - it's not in any way 'necessary' to the musical experience. (And I am not certain that knowledge of the poem enhances the music...)

Even Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons' which incorporates a cornucopia of non musical signifieds such as barking dogs, the quality of iciness and so forth still requires the listener to have the 'meaning' in mind before the musical experience. Play the piece to someone who had somehow avoided any exposure to discussions of 'The Four Seasons' and I don't think that particular string effect would signify 'barking dog'.

I suppose this could be called the 'sleeve note effect' - which has been to some extent diminished by the iPod.

The Russian - perhaps we should say Soviet - composer Dmitry Shostakovich appears to challenge this notion of music as an emotional rhetoric devoid of specific 'signifieds'. We have symphonies with titles like 'Leningrad' or '1905' that insist on imagining extra musical content alongside the rhetorical experience of listening. (And of course it's impossible to listen to Sergei Prokofiev's 'Alexander Nevsky' without internally re-imagining the images created by film director Sergei Eisenstein - unless, of course, you haven't see the film.) Symphonies with names are not unusual - but does the fact that the 'Jupiter Symphony' refers for some reason to a planet have any impact of what we hear and feel? Surely not.

To be sure, Smetana's 'From my Life' or Janáček's 'Intimate Letters' invite us to 'see' the music as in some sense autobiographical - but, again, we have to go outside the music to find out how. There is no direct signifier=signified meaning system.

In the case of Shostakovich, this issue of musical meaning is much sharper and more poignant than simply thinking of a specific musical episode as representing the 'Nazi menace' to Leningrad say... As the current issue of the London Review of Books reveals, there is now a substantial critical commentary that insists that Shostakovich articulated a series of ideological and personal statements in or through his music. It goes without saying that Shostakovich was a real human being who experienced the massive upheaval of the 1917 revolution, the catastrophe of Stalinism and the Second World War - these profoundly shaped the human being who wrote the music. But how does that fact shape the way we experience the music? We can't avoid applying knowledge and recollections and quiet recent history to articulate sounds, but in the Shostakovich case the matter of meaning was dramatised by the controversial 'memoir' 'Testimony' smuggled to the West by Solomon Volkov in 1979. 'Testimony' appeared to reveal that the 'Soviet' composer of the 'Leningrad' had been all along a bitter enemy of Soviet Communism. This 'new Shostakovich' gave the music a potent new resonance at the height of the Cold War - and at the same time, enhanced the reputation of the composer's conductor son Maxim, who fled the USSR the same year that 'Testimony' was published.

Since the publication of 'Testimony' - which remains controversial - a legion of commentators has been hard at work trying to show that Shostakovich's music is a coded intellectual and emotional biography. According to Wendy Lesser author of a new book 'Music for Silenced Voices', Shostakovich's String quartets are 'little dramas, basically, with four characters... in the 8th for example, three people are holding sustained notes and one is "crying".' She can hear - Wendy tells us - a 'voice' in the Quartets - with a 'storyline'.

That 'storyline' is we discover invested with what we think we know about Shostakovich and how we now regard the tragic history he lived through, endured and experienced. The music is made to fit with the idea of Shostakovich as a secretive opponent of Stalin (and his successors). The irony here is that in a totalitarian regime, most music has the supreme advantage of being inarticulate - or secretive by nature. So we can imagine that the composer encoded subversive ideas in a form that can always deny it has any such meaning.

The problem is that we simply don't know for certain how Shostakovich viewed the Soviet regime, to what extent he opposed it or accommodated to it. So if we are looking for 'meaning' in the music we face a double dose of uncertainty: what might be expressed, and whether it is expressed at all.

In one very powerful respect, Shostakovich came close to a kind of explicitness. Starting in the 1940s, the composer began to include 'Jewish' musical themes in his Quartets and other works, a development that culminated his setting of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's controversial poem 'Babi Yar' (about the notorious massacre of Jews by Germans and Ukrainian auxiliaries near Kiev in 1941) as his Symphony No 13, and 'From Jewish Folk Poetry', Op.79. These are powerful works - that can illuminated by the hard facts of history and biography. Although Soviet troops liberated the extermination camps built in occupied Poland by the Germans, and discovered sites of mass murder that the SS had tried to destroy - in the post war period the Soviets denied that the German genocide had been focused mainly on European Jewry. Stalin was evidently anti-Semitic (he sacked his Jewish Foreign Minister just before signing the non aggression pact with Hitler) and after 1945, Jews were increasingly persecuted in the Soviet Union - culminating in the Doctors' Trial of 1953, the year Stalin died.

We know that Shostakovich actively assisted his Jewish friends. He completed his student Veniamin Fleischmann's opera 'Rothschild's Violin' when the composer was killed on the front. He courageously intervened with the murderous Beria when his Polish Jewish friend Mieczyslaw Weinberg was arrested and assumed legal guardianship of his Weinberg's daughter.

Here I think we have a cluster of biographical facts and musical works that if not taken together would impoverish our experience of the music. While Shostakovich's musical 'story' must remain forever an enigma wrapped in a shroud, his acknowledgement of the Jewish experience is charged with 'meaning'.http://www.holocaustresearchproject.net/einsatz/babiyar.html

Is There Anybody There?

2011-12-05T10:13:00.001+01:00

Is it possible that my first documentary for Channel 4, made in the last century, might become a youtube cult?

The documentary has just been posted online - and has received 7000 hits in a few days.

Is There Anybody There (hereafter ITAT) was made for a still evolving and adventurous Channel 4 in 1987 - I left the BBC to make the film. It was written and narrated by Dr Nicholas Humphrey - and it is to Nick that the film owes its many unusual qualities.

Very few television documentaries genuinely investigate the paranormal: ITAT did. The broadcasters are still churning out the likes of Britain's most haunted which cater to credulity. To be sure, ITAT entertainingly debunked some celebrated, iconic 'claims of the paranormal' like the Rendlesham Forest UFO, and the apparition of the Virgin at Knock in Ireland.

But Nick did more than merely debunk. As he points out, the paranormal - and its associated anti rational cults like the myth of Atlantis and creationism - is a many headed Hydra-like creature which thrives on a simple additive process which says 'ok you can explain this, but how do you explain that...and that... and that?' and so on ad infinitum.

ITAT followed philosopher David Hume:

'The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish: And even in that case, there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.'

Nick took an imaginative approach. He had of course long been fascinated by peculiarities of the human mind - and he was intrigued to discover what that mind 'sees' in a ghost or a UFO? What drives our fascination with these delusions? That's why we filmed not only at Knock, but also at famous tower that the poet WB Yeats lived and worked in - Yeats was fascinated by all kinds of demons and spirits. We also filmed at the astonishing 'Concrete Garden' in Branxton, Northumberland - a kind of northern British equivalent of the creations of the Facteur Cheval.

ITAT is of course dated - it is quite slowly paced and was one of the first documentaries shot on tape stock - which in a technical sense has not completely stood the test of time.

It's the ideas that count. I learnt a lot from making this film - it informed the documentaries I made for the BBC about the myth of Atlantis, which led to my first book about the mythologies that informed the Nazi SS...

Thanks, Nick.

Speechless

2011-12-05T08:49:00.001+01:00

The abysmal stupidity of the current regime - the Cameron coalition I mean - is eye watering.

Where to start? Well one point well made in the Guardian this morning is the green issue. Of course, those two words Guardian and green, and in the same sentence, are guaranteed to provoke contemptuous chortling among the Tory faithful.

Green implies well meaning sandal wearers in muddy allotments. More seriously it implies chaining industry to impossible emissions targets and so on...

Osbourne is like a blind man in a fog.

Well I say - come to Germany. The German government and its industrial mandarins like to promote their green credentials as a symbol of the morally cleansed new Germany. (Apologies for those well armed neo Nazis...) They also make a lot gas guzzling cars here - which, whether electric, gas fired or whatever, is a dumb technology. The green hypocrisy of Hitler's old car company Volkswagen is stomach turning - as Greenpeace has shown.

That's the downside... and to be sure Germany remains a massive polluter.

But what the morons in Cameron's cabinet don't get is that Germans realised long ago that there was serious money in a green economy. They have pioneered new technologies - and now they are selling it... They are of course up against the Chinese - who have also understood that investing in green stuff is way to make yet more trillions...

We will live long enough to regret Plan A. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdOWChIXgd8

So farewell Ken Russell, and Stalin's daughter Svetlana

2011-11-29T06:29:00.000+01:00

The British television and film maker Ken Russell, who has recently died, had not made a significant film since the late 1980s. Now we are being reminded of his TV and cinema work and/or lamenting the passing of a great British eccentric.

Was Russell's decline and fall self made? Did he lose his way? Did we properly recognise his talent? Or did we somehow not know what to do with him? It certainly looked that way when he appeared to evolve into a red faced buffoon who survived for four excruciating days in the Big Brother House. I am Ozymandias king of kings...

And in this same week, Stalin's daughter Svetlana has died, broke, in the United States, many decades after her defection caused so much rejoicing in the land of the free, and gnashing of teeth in the Soviet Union.

I once noticed Russell flicking through record sleeves in a music shop in the Charing Cross Road: I have always regretted not telling him directly how much his films meant to me - in fact, he had probably just finished making a relatively tame version of 'The Rainbow'.

I missed Russell's first films for the BBC Omnibus strand - but can still recall the impact of the Delius film 'A Song of Summer'. Did Russell make a better film than this? In this perfectly realised work, he goes a lot further than the elegiac Elgar documentary and unpicks a thorny and intriguing relationship between the composer Frederick Delius and his aspiring amanuensis Eric Fenby. 'Song of Summer' tells a rich story, with vividly realised characters - wonderfully acted. It has flashes of genius - for example Percy Grainger's sudden eruption into the narrative, and the wonderful last sequence where Delius is hauled up a mountain to greet the sun.

These are films driven by a passion for music and its creators.

After this, critical responses to Russell began to deploy a mealy mouthed lexicon - which reduced invention to self indulgence. In hindsight, 'Dance of the Seven Veils' simply gets Richard Strauss wrong - and for many, it has become hard to disentangle the complexity of Strauss's troubled and troubling relation with the Third Reich from the images Russell conjured up. But Russell dared to re-imagine with flare and commitment the imaginative world of artists who had for too long been immured inside the carapace of respect.

The same kind of committed imagination animated 'The Music Lovers', 'Women in Love' 'Mahler' and 'The Devils' - which must be recognised as landmarks of British cinema, just as Russell recognised the value of Gaudier-Breszka in 'Savage Messiah': a compelling film that he self financed.

After that? Well my honest answer is I don't know - I haven't seen 'Tommy' for a long time, and I have never seen the films Russell made in the United States. I will value him for the BBC drama documentaries and the early films. He may have lost his way - but how much was that helped along by a national culture that failed to recognise and understand his talent?

And was Stalin's daughter Svetlana of use to us for just a very short time - to fade into penury as a ghost of the Cold War?

Let's all be Germans

2011-11-20T05:56:00.001+01:00

It is of course grossly stupid to refer to modern united Germany as the Fourth Reich or to make spluttering Basil Fawlty like noises about the hegemonic power of this intriguing nation at the heart of modern Europe.

Of course.

But two points strike me - and I am not sure how they are related. Perhaps you can assist? In the Observer William Keegan notes that its German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the teflon coated saint of the ruling CDU, who appears ever so subtly to dangle the war option:

"Nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe… that's why I say: if the euro fails, Europe fails… We have a historical obligation: to protect by all means Europe's unification process begun by our forefathers after centuries of hatred and blood spill. None of us can foresee what the consequences would be if we were to fail."

Interesting use of the passive voice there: 'centuries of hatred and blood spill'.

That's strong ins't? If the Euro fails, expect something worse to follow. Keegan also points out the that the Euro itself was foisted on Europe by a Germany that feared other currencies could devalue against the Deutschmark. And are we not harvesting that seed now? As Germany maintains admittedly unspectacular growth, other economies that cannot devalue their currency are failing?

Germany does have competitive and innovative companies: but these are built on the foundation of low wages and a work force bought off by long contracts. This is the bed rock of German economic hegemony. Efficiency, innovation and so on follow on from that.

It could have been worse. In a fascinating interview in Spiegel Professor Sir Ian Kershaw mulls over the German reluctance to surrender after the summer of 1944 when the Reich faced certain defeat. (Arguable defeat was certain from the winter of 1941... but let's stay with perceptions here...) What is especially intriguing is Kershaw's thought experiment about the possible consequences if the July 1944 Bomb Plot had succeeded - he implies that the consequence might have been a very different, undemocratic, militarised 'new Germany'.

'When one writes about these things, one feels an inner wish that they should succeed. I believe this is the position of any person who is not caught up in the ideas of Nazism. In the last year of World War II, as many people died in Europe as on all military fronts throughout all of World War I. Politically speaking, however, it is probably a blessing that the plotters failed in their attempt. Otherwise, the chances of having a democratic Germany would have been significantly slimmer.'

Many of the men and women who resisted Hitler and his regime (and there weren't many of them) were very courageous people, who suffered appalling punishment. Any visitor to Berlin should pay their respects at the graves of the Bonhoeffers in the Chausse Strasse cemetery. But I have never been able to bring myself to admire the architect of the 'Bomb Plot' Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Stauffenberg was an extremist aristocratic German nationalist who resented the plebeian Hitler's corruption of an 'eternal Germany'. He was happy enough to fight and help destroy the despised Poles in 1939, and raised no objection to the the catastrophic invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Allegedly, Stauffenberg was repelled by SS mass murder in occupied Russia - I have never seen much evidence that proves this was what motivated him to turn against Hitler. Like so many of the German Widerstand, he was dismayed by the imminence of German defeat.

Historian Richard Evans stresses:

'Stauffenberg thought of himself first and foremost as a soldier, in the centuries-old tradition of his family, and for a long while, this military identity outweighed the influences he had imbibed through his membership of the George circle. But even in the late 1930s, he was markedly more sympathetic to National Socialism than were many more senior officers. His relatives were wont to describe him as the only "brown" member of the family. While he was later to lose altogether his enthusiasm for National Socialism, he never lost his contempt for parliamentary democracy. This alone would make him ill-fitted to serve as a model for the conduct and ideas of future generations.'

Had Stauffenberg succeeded, Kershaw suggests, the Germany that would have arisen from the ashes of Hitler's headquarters would have reflected the values of the resistance. It would not have been the democratic Germany that was slowly built after the unconditional surrender of 1945.

Chancellor Merkel appears to sincerely believe that a German dominated EU is good for all Europeans. It seems churlish to question her cherished beliefs - but how curious to - as it were - mention the war.

Longman History Today History Book of the Year Long List

2011-11-09T13:38:00.002+01:00

My book 'Hitler's Foreign Executioners' has been long listed for the Longman History Today History Book of the Year Award.

Frozen Planet, the modern sublime

2011-10-30T16:34:00.001+01:00

There are some Telegraph types who long for a BBC free world - replaced no doubt by the crooked wonders of Sky TV.

Rephrasing JFK - I say watch 'Frozen Planet' the astonishing new masterpiece from the BBC's Natural History Unit, and the Open University.

The series is the 21st Century equivalent of the what our Romantic forebears called the Sublime: it is replete with truly astonishing wonders.

More than that, it is the product of the kind of creative and long term financial investment that only the BBC can pull off. The BBC makes mistakes and miscalculations: but it would be the grossest short term-ism to stem the tide of programmes like 'Frozen Planet'.

Anonymous Shakespeare

2011-10-26T16:11:00.000+02:00

I remember reading in the diary of Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer and later governor of the General Government i.e. occupied Poland, that Shakespeare was so great an artist that he 'must have been a German'.

I was reminded of Frank's rapture this week.

The astonishing fuss being generated by a daft new film that dramatises the idiotic arguments about the authorship of 'Shakespeare' and championing the claims made for Edward de Vere chimes with other aspects of a credulous age - the rejection of evolution by natural selection to take just one example.

Mix this with our obsession with the cult of cultural celebrity - and hey presto an utterly vacuous 'debate'.

Apparently the director of the new film has pompously proclaimed that it is 'not good to tell kids lies in schools.' this phrase ominously echoes the Creationist stance on teaching evolution.

Admirers of 'Anonymous' must not only swallow the silliness about de Vere - they must also accept that he was both the son and lover of Queen Elizabeth.

Garbage in.. garbage out.

I would recommend anyone who might be confused by this ridiculous controversy to read James Shapiro's excellent book 'Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?'. Shapiro's New York Times piece presents some of his key arguments in response to the movie.

This is surely telling:

Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing de Vere’s supporters is that he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.

There is also this site which has links to some cogent essays if you still need convincing.

Shapiro performs two services very well - he explains why various oddballs have become obsessed with the supposedly contested authorship of Shakespeare's plays and he gathers together and lucidly presents the evidence that this fellow called William Shakespeare, born in Stratford, wrote the bulk of the literary works attributed to him.

Shapiro is no idolator. He shows clearly that Shakespeare was a collaborator and that some of the plays should have someone else's name alongside his. If you are a worshipper of Shakespeare that may be an uncomfortable fact: but Shapiro's conclusion is convincing and tells us something about the literary culture of the age of Shakespeare.

No one it seems was terribly bothered by the Shakespeare authorship question until the 19th Century. Then a number of powerful forces came into play. The first paradoxically was the heady elevation of Shakespeare's work by German romantics like Goethe and by English critics who began to reconstruct this long dead playwright as an emblem of national genius. But the Romantic period also elevated the Artist, with a capital A as a unique, exquisitely sensitive type exemplified by poets like Byron and Shelley. So works of art needed an Artist - and the life and personality of Shakespeare proved to be frustratingly elusive.

Those two Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were of course aristocrats. And the majority of the researchers who have contested the authorship of the Stratford man were and are essentially snobs. We hear time and again that the humble William was not sufficiently educated to create the dramatic world of 'Hamlet', 'Lear' and so on and on. The 'true' author must have been a gentleman from the educated aristocracy - like this Earl of Oxford fellow in the new film. What sick making snobbery.

The case for Edward de Vere was first developed in the early 20th Century by J. Thomas Looney - who despised democracy and modernity. Looney's prejudices (which also included anti-Semitism) inspired him to imagine the author of 'Shakespeare's plays' as nobleman with a broad experience of the Renaissance world: not, as he apparently believed, a glove maker's son and vulgar money-lender from Stratford.

This kind of delusion is surely from the same stock as believing that one's ancestors must be noble in some way.

Does this matter? Well I think it does because we seem to live in a time when conviction - that Darwin was wrong, that there was a lost kingdom of Atlantic and menu et ceteras - appear as valid as arguments based on hard evidence.

That evidence certainly exists for Shakespeare's authorship of his plays even if 'the real man' may never be as vivid as the contemporary artists whose quotidian experience is a matter of instant record.

Like the Creationist arguments against natural selection, the anti Shakespeare lobby regurgitate tired old arguments that fly in the face of hard evidence. Although the life and 'personality' of Stratford born William Shakespeare are likely to remain enigmatic, there is a mass of evidence linking him - or him and other playwrights like Thomas Dekker - to the plays published under the name William Shakespeare.

This evidence is grippingly unfolded in Shapiro's book.

We have to grow up and accept that Shakespeare, as a creative personality, will never have the detailed immediacy of Byron - or Amy Winehouse.

The contesting of Shakespeare's authorship is driven by fantasy, psychological projection and delusion.

See the film - laugh at it - then forget it.

What is wrong with BBC drama commissioning?

2011-10-22T16:44:00.000+02:00

This week the BBC drama department perpetrated its worst crime so far - an abysmal rendering of the not especially interesting controversy about Monty Python's 'Life of Brian'.

How on earth did the script for this farrago get through the supposedly rigorous commissioning process. Did no one view the finished result and say - no.

Worst of all - watching this garbage has made me sound like that bloke in Tunbridge Wells.

The Guardian TV critic critic compared this idiocy to wanking. Woody Allen had a good reply to that kind of comparison - but what it meant in this case was a chronic display of BBC self obsession and internal navel gazing. The most egregious wanking (no not wanting Mr Spell Checker) was embodied in a scene where someone or other visited the office of the Controller of BBC 4 who was shown as a kind of maniacal coke sniffer.

I am sure this scene provoked tremendous guffawing and nudge nudging from the BBC mandarins including the actual BBC4 head honcho Richard Klein. I suppose it was a kind of back handed compliment to suggest that BBC commissioners spend their time snorting in their glass framed offices - in fact they are mainly rather punctilious individuals who tend to punish those of us who step out of line.

And what was the very worst offence? The drama was NOT DRAMATIC. It was dead in the water. It was pushing up the daisies. It had joined the choir celestial... If you are going to use, or parody the 'Pythonesqu'e then you'd better do it better than they did - and this was so horribly inept.

Come on guys - get it together - though I am beginning to like the incomprehensible Hidden.

The horror, the horror

2011-10-22T16:29:00.000+02:00

In 1945, the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been levered back into power by Hitler, was apprehended fleeing through northern Italy by a partisan unit and executed. Il Duce had been accompanied by his devoted mistress Claretta Petucci, who was killed with him. Partisans took the bodies of Mussolini and Petucci as well those of a handful of other Fascist paladins to the Piazzale Loreto near Milan's central station, where the German occupiers of Italy had executed partisans a few months earlier. The corpses were dumped in public view and a macabre variety of posthumous insults perpetrated by vengeful crowds. Mussolini's corpse was arranged in a suggestive manner alongside Petucci's; women squatted over his corpse and urinated. A priest finally ordered the bodies to be hung from the canopy of a garage forecourt - carefully arranging Petucci's dress to preserve her modesty: on the day she was shot with her lover, she was wearing no underwear. It is hard to plan for summary execution.

I abhor Mussolini's politics. But I equally despise the manner of his death. The brutal murder of fallen leaders while comprehensible in the violent circumstances of their downfall bears no resemblance to justice. Mussolini deserved a trial (as what?) as much as any of the German leadership tried and judged at Nuremberg. None of these people, in my view, should have been put to death. If as a civilised nation we reject capital punishment, the same principal cannot be abrogated in any circumstance. Had Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, the evil architects of the worst genocide in history, survived the war, the moral imperative that eventually repealed capital punishment should have left them to moulder in prison cells, not drop from a gallows at the hand of Britain's hangman.

These thoughts were provoked of course by the hideous public killing of the former Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi. The body of this murderous individual is now on public display in a market freezer. No one apparently is quite sure what to do with this relic of dictatorship than to queue up and insult the corpse. It is perhaps inevitable that video images of Gaddafi's capture, and immediate humiliation should be instantly available on Youtube and splashed all over the paper. When I stopped on the way home from school with my six year old to buy some water, an image of Gaddafi's bloody head and shoulders were displayed on a newspaper billboard. 'What's wrong with that man, daddy?'

In the case of Italy, the liberated nation never completely recovered from the civil war that exploded after the German occupation that followed Mussolini's ousting by his own Grand Fascist Council. Lurking in the shadows of Berlusconi's libido is a deeply fractured people. The German occupation, which was managed by the SS as well as the Wehrmacht, exploited profound divisions in Italian society and provoked what was effectively a brutal civil war. Once the SS had a free hand, thanks in part to the new Italian Social Republic, a kind of distillation of Fascism led somewhat reluctantly by a psychologically defeated Mussolini, the fate of Italian Jewry was sealed.

This historical scarring should be kept in mind by the new leaders of liberated Libya on the other side of the Mediterranean and once part of the Italian Empire. It is a truism to say that violence begets violence - but it is much less obvious that paroxysms of murder can mutilate a fragile new nation for generations to come.

There are some very contradictory signs coming out of the Arab autumn. The killing of Col Gaddafi inevitably evokes memories of the capture of Saddam Hussein - another egregious dictator whose American engineered despatch led to years of bloodshed. Will Libyans have to endure the same? The astonishing brave opposition who have taken to the streets of Syrian cities to seek and end to one of the most vicious regimes in the Middle East have so far been rewarded only by violent death - and a criminal hands off approach from the international community. What does the murder of Copts reveal about the stalemated Egyptian revolution? And we can be sure that expensive German exported Tiger tanks will ensure the Saudi regime in perpetuity - they are designed to attack demonstrators, not rival armies.

Historical tragedy appears to repeat itself - as tragedy.

Booker

2011-10-20T10:24:00.000+02:00

Should I now read Julian Barnes' 'Booker Prize Winning Novel'? Probably. Maybe. To be sure, at some point.

I have read one novel from the Booker short list already - 'Snowdrops' by A.D. Miller. It is an engrossing, expertly crafted thriller, that suffers from severe plausibility problems. But if this one, why not Robert Harris or Philip Kerr?

If the Booker judges truly believed in their populist choice why did they then award the top prize to Barnes? This smacks of bad faith. The selection may not have been provocative enough!

On the other hand, I don't think Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Stranger's Child' is a major literary work. It felt small minded to me - though exquisitely wrapped in beautiful prose.

Prizes are necessary, absurd, revealing, childish. They are invariably wrong notes. The fact is as one of the judges Gaby Wood admits in the Torygraph is that we simply don't know the identity of literary works of value. Many years ago a dreadful 'literary' work called The Bone People' won the Booker Prize: it proved to be almost unreadable. The smartest prize givers should think of imposing a ten year moratorium on their rushes to judgment:

Without disowning the decision he’d made, [a former Booker judge] suggested there ought to be a Man Booker 10 Years On Prize, because the way a book captures the public imagination does not necessarily come through in the year of its initial publication. When he thought about which of the books published in the year he was a judge had most carried its weight across the decade that followed, the book he lighted on was one that had not even made the shortlist.

The power of the blog!

2011-10-14T18:48:00.001+02:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2011/oct/14/liam-fox-resigns-live-coverage

Just joking!

Not fantastic 'Dr' Fox

2011-10-14T12:53:00.002+02:00

Irrational I suppose, but I find the frequent references to 'Dr' Liam Fox, the creepy defence secretary, annoying. He has a doctorate I assume, but in what? Or is he a medical doctor?

In any case, the Fox business is murky. It is also emblematic of the arrogance of the Cameron 'Coalition' that appears determined to brazen out the farce - no doubt gaining Cameron brownie points from the Tory right.

I suppose that there is a a prurient interest in 'Dr' Fox's relationship with his chum Werritty (a name that sounds like a joke about truthfulness: verity...)

What the Fox affair is really about is the secretive arrogance of our government ministers. Whatever the nature of their friendship, which sometimes resembles a perverse re imagining of Winnie the Pooh with Werritty as a plump Christopher Robin, the crucial issue is the way the gruesome Fox appears to run his department as an exclusive private club. It suggests to me that this particular Ministry needs proper public regulation and scrutiny.

It is astonishing to discover that at taxpayer expense 'Dr' Fox and his friend have been partying in Dubai on at least six occasions since the election, drinking so called treasure chest cocktails.

I look forward the Doctor's eventual downfall - and good riddance.

British obsessions

2011-09-30T09:55:00.000+02:00

Simon Jenkins had a rant in the Guardian this week about our obsession with the Second World War. He was provoked to do this by a new Max Hastings blockbuster - which amazon tells me should be delivered to my door soon. Sorry, Simon...

How many more times does someone have to reference the German episode of 'Fawlty Towers'? The message of that episode was simple: the German characters are decent people, Basil is mad.

Jenkins refers to his German friends 'smiling patiently' or something to that effect. I assume that they must have the same reaction to the Second World 'obsession' manifested by Spiegel and the German television station ZDF?

The Spiegel journalists are 'obsessed' it would seem with exposing the way - to take a few examples - the Adenauer government tried to manipulate the Eichmann trial in 1961, and the West German secret service (BND) recruited former members of the SS - including Walther Rauff who 'invented' the gassing truck.

German historians are also 'obsessed' with exposing the long denied participation of the German Foreign Office in the Holocaust.

German historians - whose work has yet to be translated - have courageously tackled some powerful shibboleths that Germany has yet to come to terms with. It was German historians who revealed the murderous role played by the allegedly 'clean' German army in the Holocaust.

I would agree with Jenkins if this British obsession really was preoccupied only with a Dads' Army world view that misinterprets Britain's role in the defeat of Hitler. But the books I have read like Anthony Beevor's D-Day, and Hastings' account of Churchill at war present excoriating accounts of how the Brits fought the war (not very effectively) - and the way 'we' were humiliated by the Americans and Lend Lease. Anyone who has read just these two books will understand that Stalin's armies did indeed win the war. Few modern historians are complacent about the consequences of 'our' alliance with the Soviet Union.

What I think Jenkins fails to recognise is that modern historical scholarship, much of it carried out by German scholars, has revealed a very different world war from the old Guns of Navarone, Spitfires and Home Guard story. (Or on the German side U Boats! Jenkins does not comment on the enormous popularity of the German TV series 'Das Boot'.)

This account of the Second World War foregrounds the German plans for massive liquidation of life, starting with European Jewry. These plans, which were very well documented of course, were drawn up by thousands of compliant civil servants who envisaged extinguishing the lives of over 25 million people - so that the German Volk could prosper and eat their fill.

A German historian - an obsessive, presumably - tells us that:

'The Hunger Plan also appeared on other occasions. For Göring it was a favorite subject. In November 1941 he told the Italian foreign minister Count Ciano that within a year 20 to 30 million people would starve to death in Russia. Maybe this was a good thing, for certain peoples needed to be reduced. Hitler spoke of a "population catastrophe" of the "Muscovites" and declared that due to lack or destruction of food "millions would have to die". According to Goebbels, the German leadership declared "publicly that Russia has nothing to expect from us and that we will let it starve to death." The General Plenipotentiary for Labor Employment, Fritz Sauckel, stated on 4 August 1942, during a visit in the occupied Soviet territories, that when he had been there in the autumn of 1941 "all German authorities had persisted in the conviction that in the following, i.e. in the past winter, at least ten to twenty million of these people would simply starve to death." At least some occupation authorities on site thus stuck to the guidelines as they were repeatedly stated similar to this: "We cannot feed the whole land. The intelligence has been killed, the commissars are gone. Huge areas will be left to themselves (starve to death)." Also the Eastern Minister Rosenberg repeatedly stated that the starvation death of millions was "a harsh necessity that stands outside any sentiment."'

We simply do not understand how and why a modern nation state conceived these diabolical master plans - which consumed the lives of millions of Jews before the defeat of Germany was accomplished.

Answering that question is a worthy obsession.

So not just Volkswagen then...

2011-09-29T10:54:00.003+02:00

Was the German Wirtschaftwunder founded on the avarice of the Third Reich? Was 1945 really year zero - or business as usual.

In part, the answer has to be yes. The auto giant Volkswagen was, of course, founded as a direct consequence of Adolf Hitler's obsession with Das Auto. Now we know for certain that the Quandt family who now own most of BMW, also has a very dark past.

You can read about the super wealthy Quandts in the German press or the Independent. NDR made a documentary a few years ago called 'The Silence of the Quandt Family', which so appalled its viewers that it provoked the family to commission an 'enquiry'.

During the war, the Quandt businesses cruelly exploited slave labour, then refused to pay reparations.

But then which of the famous German companies didn't? Allianz, the 'insurance giant', robbed its Jewish clients during the Nazi period, then fought long and hard not to compensate them.

Does this matter? Well, it's absurd to say that anything associated with the Quandts is 'drenched in blood'. But as far as I know, there is no accessible account of what and how much the post war German economy owes to German government economic policy, which was founded on the massive exploitation of slave labour, between 1933 and 1945.

Who for example were the architects of the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) programme that brought millions of Italians and Turks to toil in German factories for pitifully low wages thus fuelling the economic miracle of the 1950s? Low wages and compliant unions remain the bed rocks of German competitiveness.

Recently I have spent some time researching the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in 1944. One of the SS officers involved in this operation, which is mainly associated with the name of Adolf Eichmann, was the former SS Standartenführer Kurt Andreas Becher - who was 'Commissar of the Concentration Camps' and Heinrich Himmler's suave economics expert. (At the 1961 Eichmann trial he tested from his home in Bremen, and presented himself as a mere fancier of horse flesh.) Essentially, Becher plundered Jewish businesses. He did on a vast scale what many ordinary men who participated in the German genocide did on a small scale - he robbed and stole. But for complicated reasons, Becher was given a 'character reference' in Nuremberg and escaped appropriate punishment. He died a rich man in 1995.

We can be certain he was not the only unpunished war criminal who enjoyed the wages of mass murder.

The Herero and Himmler's Crusade

2011-09-28T10:44:00.004+02:00

In my first book Himmler's Crusade, I tried to unravel the history of German anthropology - which flourished during the Third Reich.

I told the story of an expedition to Tibet that was, in part, sponsored by Heinrich Himmler's SS Ahnenerbe. The expedition was led by Ernst Schaefer - who invited a young anthropologist and member of the SS called Bruno Beger to join the expedition. Beger used conventional anthropometric techniques to find what he called 'Europid' traits in Asian populations in northern India and Tibet. He claimed to have found them - which would have pleased SS Chief Himmler who believed that Eurasia had once been ruled by Aryan empire builders who had left their biological mark on the Tibetan plateau.

I interviewed Beger, who died quite recently, and made some intriguing discoveries about his anthropological antecedents.

First of all I discovered that Beger had been taught at Jena University by Hans F.K. Guenther - known as the 'Rassen Papst' (Race Pope) who had published a series of widely read quasi populist books about the superiority of Nordic peoples, and the alleged degeneracy of Jews and other races, and been given his university chair by the Thuringia NSDAP - in 1932. It was Guenther who proposed the existence of a long vanished Nordic or Aryan empire.

Secondly, Beger informed me of a childhood mentor who had travelled to Namibia in SW Africa at the turn of last century and inspired his young friend with dreams of escape from a depressed Germany.

And this brings me to a story reported today in Spiegel - and the Herero tribe. According to this article, the Berlin Medical Historical Museum, which is part of the Charite Hospital will return 20 skulls 'belonging to genocide victims in a former colony'.

To understand the Herero genocide we need to go back to 1871 - and Bismarck's forging of a united Germany through war with Denmark and then France. In this new Germany, as in Belgium and Italy after the Risorgimento, many longed to acquire the same colonial possessions that had made Britain rich. These 'new nations' acted with maximum brutality to turn themselves into imperial powers. The crimes of the Belgians in the Congo's 'heart of darkness' became notorious thanks to pioneering journalists.

German atrocities in SW Africa have come to light more recently. This terrible history is very well told in 'The Kaiser's Holocaust' - and I touched on it in Himmler's Crusade.

As the German colonists - one of whom was Herman Goering's grandfather - aggressively expanded their domain at the turn of the century, the indigenous peoples, the Herero and Nama tribes, became steadily marginalised. At the beginning of 1904, they rebelled - and the German army, led by General Lothar von Trotha seized the chance to not just wage war but to liquidate an entire people. They almost succeeded.

Lothar von Trotha issued this order:

'All the Herero must leave the land. If they refuse, then I will force them to do it with the big guns. Any Herero found within German borders, with or without a gun, will be shot. No prisoners will be taken. This is my decision for the Herero people'.

For German anthropologists, the Herero War was a unique opportunity. As Andrew Zimmerman revealed in his excellent book 'Anthropology and anti Humanism in Imperial Germany' Felix von Luschan (whose work influenced Guenther) at the Berlin Voelkerkundemuseum in Berlin negotiated with the German army to harvest Herero skulls from the Namibian battlefields. These were then 'studied' at the museum.

Zoologist Leonard Schultze wrote without shame:

'I could make use of the victims of war and take parts from fresh native corpses, which made a welcome addition to the study of the living body...'

German anthropology was thus founded on mass murder.

Now a few of these trophies of genocide are being returned to Namibia for burial. A state memorial service will be held in Windhoek in October.

In 1943, Bruno Beger - who had once longed to settle in Namibia - acquired his own human skeletal collection at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In letters to his friend Schaefer he extolled the scientific values of these special items.

The electric car trick

2011-09-15T12:27:00.000+02:00

I think I agree with Jeremy Clarkson and James May. Electric cars are rubbish. (That's enough Top Gear - join the Greenpeace campaign here.)

Electric cars won't save the world.

This isn't because electric vehicles are not butch enough or don't go fast enough... or are going to be hard to charge.

It's because they're all about lies.

Car manufacturers, who are gloating over their new models in Frankfurt as I write, must keep selling cars. But most modern cars are sophisticated technologies that with appropriate maintenance would keep running for years. Now that's a problem for the people who make them. They need to find ways of making your lovely new car obsolescent within say two years or less.

A recent documentary 'The Light Bulb Conspiracy' showed that built in obsolescence was the foundation of commodity production. For some reason the film ignored the car industry, apart from a token nod at Henry Ford. The film was mainly about computer printers.

So BMW, Ford, Daimler need to find ways of persuading us to exchange a very expensive lump of metal and plastic for a new expensive lump of metal and plastic. (Unless you drive a Morgan, of course.)

We all know how they do this - new designs, new gadgets, more power and speed... and so on and on.

At Frankfurt this year a lot of space is given over to new kinds of engine - electric, fuel cell and so on. This supposedly green technology is a gift for the car people - in the medium term. In the next few years, their master plan is to make us exchange those boring petrol and diesel vehicles for sparkling new 'green' vehicles.

Some of these, like the ridiculous new Volkswagen, are designed for single occupancy.

All of these strategies are based on bare faced lies. First of all, the car manufacturers have perused us to look at the emissions of single vehicles as the key measurement of how 'green' a new car is... This of course disguises the emissions record of manufacturing that vehicles and then disposing of it when it is perceived as obsolescent.

Emission levels of single vehicles say nothing at all about the impact of yet more millions of cars on our urban and rural environments - to say nothing of the mounting death on the world's roads which we take for granted as the price of progress.

Most of these cars are designed to be 'second cars' for wealthy families who are deluded enough to think that one car is not enough. This of course is another way in which good old BIO (built in obsolescence) works. My main car is not enough - so I need a little Ford as a run around or for the wife.

Car makers want the world to buy their cars - while they weep crocodile tears about emissions, they don't care if the entire planet is turned into a multi lane black top to run their expensive toys.

Finally, the energy that drives these new cars has to come from somewhere - and most of it is generated by burning fossil fuels.

James Lovelock once said that the automobile would make us extinct - it surely will, electric, petrol, hydrogen... it doesn't matter a jot.

And take a look at this.

Downward to darkness on extended wings

2011-09-15T09:48:00.001+02:00

I am not sure why that line sprang to mind - it's the end of Wallace Stevens' wonderful poem 'Sunday Morning'. I was thinking about the Coalition government and a recently published photograph of our Chancellor enjoying a night out with a paid for lady and apparently a table top's worth of cocaine. Note: these are not proven facts.

But yes that's why. Downward to darkness. Probably no extended wings...

How much do you hate and despise the current British government? How stupid are they? For me a lot, and very answers both questions satisfactorily.

George 'Black Beauty' Osbourne's gruesome economics... the destruction of the NHS... rocketing unemployment... the Thatcheresque erosion of British industry. Yes I know Bombardier is Canadian, but it provides jobs for British workers, not the lovely folk of a Siemens factory in the Ruhr.

The only good news is that Germany has not forced us to our knees as they have the Greeks.

The stupidity - yup that's the word - of the Coalition is brilliantly dissected in John Lanchester's London Review of Books essay - which begins by pointing out the rather wonderful fact that Belgium has not had a government for 15 months and has the highest GDP growth rate in Europe.

Lanchester who in my view writes superbly about the arcane world of economics has two very salient points to make as well as his witty Belgian analysis. I have grown weary of hearing the dim witted views of people who blame the recent and unfinished global financial crisis on the last government and Gordon Brown. The crisis was fomented by banks - and no economy is out of the woods yet because of bank lending policies. The Banks both Anglo Saxon and European ones are sick. Their contagion is pervasive. Period. Britain is in debt not 'because of Gordon Brown' but because Brown was forced to prop up collapsing banks.

What is profoundly stupid about the Coalition policy is that it makes two horrific mistakes. First of all it is based on a dumb metaphor - that national economies are somehow like domestic ones. But as Lanchester argues:

The problem is in large part to do with the application of an incorrect metaphor, the easy-to-understand idea that a household has to live within its income. But governments are not households, and the idea of cutting your way to prosperity cannot be read across from an individual’s finances to those of the state.

Secondly, you can't cut your way to growth.

It’s a manifest fact that these policies, and the refusal to embrace stimulus spending, are causing economic slowdowns all over the world that are triggering the current anxiety in the markets, which is in turn causing the predicament of governments to intensify, as confidence sinks and the self-fulfilling expectations of a second downturn take hold. This in turn puts pressure on expectations about governments’ abilities to repay their debts, which further lowers confidence, and so on.

What Lanchester doesn't address in this article is the grisly hypocrisy of austerity politics. It is not directed at the bankers, or industrialists... but at us - ordinary working Joes. We lose our jobs, we face rising prices. It is our children who are damaged by Baronet Osbourne. It is our students who face a new educational regime fit only for the rich. In Germany, you read a lot of stuff about the feckless Greeks and so on - and a lot of whining about 'bailing out' economies like the Greeks and Portuguese who are allegedly spendthrift. Perhaps buying German exports like the ridiculous motor cars being tarted around Frankfurt had something to do with this profligacy?

Ah well... they can't take Wallace Stevens away from us - can they?

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Shameful Albert Hall protest

2011-09-02T17:54:00.000+02:00

The disgusting audience protests at the Albert Hall this week that forced the superb Israel Philharmonic to abandon its Proms performance proves conclusively that so called pro Palestinian campaigning is the most grotesque anti-Semitism.

These protestors do not truly care about 'the Palestinians' - they hate Israel. And they hate Israel because they are anti-Semites. That they succeeded in a display of grotesque and cowardly intolerance all too reminiscent of the Third Reich is shameful.

This was an attack on culture and humanist decency. What benefit did it bring a single Palestinian? You have an answer?

It would seem that the boycott wing of these pro Palestinian factions do not understand the fundamentals of Middle Eastern politics. Israel is a democracy, imperfect, to be sure, like most democracies - the majority of Arab states are not, even though a few are struggling to move in that direction. Listen to what the Israel Philharmonic's conductor Zubin Mehta, quoted in the Daily Telegraph:

"I hope Israel takes advantage of the new regimes to come close to them and that the new regimes will also try to make a détente with Israel....

This orchestra has done things that other great orchestras don't have to do, thank God, but because we find ourselves in this corner here we have to take part in the ebb and flow of the life of the country. Hopefully we will play music very soon in Amman...'

We can be certain that many members of the Israel Philharmonic descend from Holocaust survivors - the worst genocide in human history. We can also be certain that a conversation with members of the orchestra would reveal a diversity of opinion about Israel's strategy in the occupied territories - and the desperate need for peace. No doubt you would find a string player who protested about the attack on Gaza. Perhaps an oboist who lost a family member to a terrorist inspired rocket attack...

In the meantime, the political organisation that represents the interests of the Palestinian people - I mean Hamas, but is Fatah much different? - continues to deploy the murderous language of anti-Semitism to denounce the democratic state of Israel.

Yes - decent people want change, they want peace, they want an imaginative kind of politics that brings progress not death and destruction. Many many Israelis despise the intransigence of all the enemies of peace - whether they are fellow citizens of Israel or Palestinians or Egyptians or Libyans.

This grotesque attack on an icon of Israeli culture is Jew hatred at its virulent worst: it should be despised.

Page Eight

2011-08-30T13:29:00.003+02:00

After the disappointment of The Hour, I had high hopes for David Hare's Page Eight - another BBC drama.

I am not sure what to make of it. It hared into sub John le Carré territory, with jaded ageing spies and the miasma of treachery. Why?

The narrative beef was all about the fictional PM's knowledge of American torture centres and Islamic plots with an add on about the perfidy of 'Israelis'. I quote from Hare's script - to my ears, Rachel Weisz's repeated use of the term 'Israelis' as the killers of her white flag waving brother rang false. Surely IDF troops?

The scenes with the stroppy Home Sec felt like left overs from The Thick of It.

So - nothing very new or original here. I sensed Hare was trying out different narrative modes to see how they felt.

Having said that, Page Eight was, compared to The Hour or the ghastly Glorious 39, scintillating television drama - the writing sparkled and it looked terrific.

I'm not convinced that BBC drama commissioning has a vision or coherent strategy. Hare should have delivered, but the ambitions of Page Eight felt narrow and safety conscious.

The Hour is over

2011-08-28T09:47:00.001+02:00

I watched the last two episodes of The Hour. I'm not a television critic (who but Clive James does this job with any brilliance?) - just a viewer. My impression was that the last two episodes gained some sort of dramatic traction - with a superb sequence in the final episode as the show went on air - which was dissipated in the final confrontation between Freddie and Clarence. It was as if The Hour's writer wanted to please as many constituencies as possible: for Telegraph readers who hate the BBC - a Soviet spy in Aunty's underwear - even if this one had some convenient second thoughts about the Soviet invasion of Hungary. And for Guardian folk - the BBC stands up to government interference! Well we'd all like be Freddie Lyon right? Believe me - he doesn't exist.

This just didn't wash. There is nothing wrong with dramatising a complex web of intertwined narratives and characters - but The Hour consistently bungled this hard to achieve art.

Although the series provided a few meaty parts for female actors, like the excellent Anna Chancellor, I think its fell down badly with the main character - namely, Bel Rowley played so uncertainly by Romola Garai. (Still, she was a lot more convincing in this than in the dire Glorious 39...)

Uncertainly - because the part was conceived so ineptly. Bel was given a few scenes where she 'stood up to' government interference: none was believable. She wasn't believable. In dramatic terms, Bel was consistently sidelined by Freddie and Hector. Freddie did all the sleuthing, while Bel obsessed about Hector. The steeliness Bel should have had transferred to Lix Storm (Anna Chancellor) who, to be sure, had some terrific moments - this part was another cliche: the tough woman who thinks like a man. Sub Howard Hawks movies.

I never completely believed that Bel and Hector felt much for each other - and cliche of cliches Bel gets ticked off by Clarence for ruining her career by having an affair. The dire corniness of all this was rounded off by the (wonderfully played by Oona Chaplin) long suffering wife role - who tells Bel that Hector is on loan. 'He always comes back.' Groan.

What was especially irritating was the way Bel was shown making up in two separate scenes in the build up to the crucial broadcast of The Hour. Sorry, Abi Morgan - what was that all about?

The Hour dramatised the confrontation between the BBC and the Eden government is very literal terms. Government agents visited Aunty's corridors of power and oversaw broadcasts as they went out. I can't say whether this happened in the mid 1950s or not - but it fudged the way the BBC does toe the government line, most of the time. Censorship is internalised - you don't need these men in black suits.

The Hour was not just corny - it was at heart deeply conservative. Like so many British dramas it was obsessed with the 'Grand House' story (Freddie was inexplicably evacuated to one) and the charismatic aristocrat straight out of Waugh. Everything in the plot hinged on what Lord Elms knew about his daughter Ruth - and it was he - or perhaps that should be He - who revealed the significance of the Bright Stones and the plot to kill Nasser. It had to be the decent and patriachal Lord Elms who denounced the Eden government. The upper house had the last word.

What is it with British television drama and the country house? Can we not move on from Brideshead? Grow up.

It was an inspiring idea to make a film about the BBC confronting this watershed moment of British history. (Though isn't Suez a bit of a knee jerk choice?) But The Hour was a disappointment. It was beautifully produced: the fault was all in the writing.

Why it's happening...

2011-08-22T18:19:00.000+02:00

For anyone in doubt about the value of the BBC, then I recommend Paul Mason's blog. He's Newsnight's economics editor - and this is the best analysis I have read that links together the UK riots, the Arab Spring and the emergence of a new class or type of very active radicals.

I was especially intrigued by Paul's points that:

11. To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.

12. The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.

13. This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas with he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village.

There's a lot of meat in Paul's arguments here - but he makes sense of a number of apparently free floating ingredients of the current global situation. The poor lawyers of the French Revolution changed the world - will their descendants do the same, and if so in what sorts of ways?

We have on the one hand increasingly hegemonic and globalised power blocs - as for example the Franco German insistence on so called debt brakes, that will soon impoverish the innocent citizens of Greece, Portugal and who knows which other EU nation state... On the other, as Mason correctly observes, an overturning of the old trahison des clercs - the tendency critiqued by the now little read Julien Benda that led to intellectuals betraying their radical duties by siding with the forces of reaction - nationalism and racism and so on. Benda experienced the consequences of this trahison - as a Jew, he only just survived the German occupation of France.

What impact this new revolution will have can only be dimply perceived.

Larkin

2011-08-21T10:48:00.000+02:00

Some years ago I was caught reading poems by Philip Larking by a sanctimonious hack called Ros Coward who evidently saw this as a symptom of a some deep political and possibly psychosexual malaise.

Well, I still read Larkin.

'I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long French windows at a provincial town.
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.'

This weekend, the Financial Times Life and Letters section ran a superb essay 'The Larkin Puzzle' by Martin Amis. For anyone who cares about great writing, this is essential reading. Amis, of course, knew Larkin - his father Kingsley and Larkin were life long friends. Martin Amis, we discover, once urged Larkin to 'get out more' (as it were). Now he offers us some brilliant insights into the mystery of the his great poet - and less than impressive man.

As Amis shows, Larkin's reputation suffered a tremendous battering following the publication of his Letters and a biography by Andrew Motion. The Larkin that emerged from his own private epistles and Motion's jaundiced pages was to be sure not attractive. The biography provoked Tom Paulin - a writer well known for his own anti-Semitic outbursts - to opine that Larkin's Letters were a 'distressing and revolting compilation' riddled with 'racism, misogyny and quasi fascist views'. As the tide turned against one of our 'best loved' poets, Larkin was demoted to 'a minor poet' -- and even worse a 'more and more minor' one.

I haven't read Motion's Life, nor the Letters. I don't wish to - they don't matter. Whatever nastiness lurks in these woodsheds, it doesn't inflect the poems. Amis offers a wonderful insight into the 'mystery' of Larkin's personality: and the motor of his unique creativity. Amis argues that Larkin was nihilistic about what most of us value - the treasure trove of personal memory. In a letter to Monica, he insisted '...don't talk about our lives and the dreadful passing of time. Nothing will be good enough to look back on. I know that for certain there will be nothing but remorse and regret for opportunities missed...'

Larkin upheld what Yeats, another imperfect artist, called 'perfection of the work rather than perfection of the life'. In 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' Yeats evoked the 'foul rag and bone shop of the heart'. Both of these great poets appeared to grasp and suffer from a kind of self sickness, at the same time a self honesty - that, outside the realm of work, manifested as 'misogyny'.

As we await the release of an idiotic film that enshrines the idea that William Shakespeare did not write the works of 'Shakespeare', we should get over this childish identification of the work and the life. Philip Larkin drew on his self acknowledged imperfection to distil great poetry - poetry that speaks very directly to the best in ourselves.

'...but why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element

That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.'

God

2011-07-30T17:56:00.002+02:00

I've been reading the New Statesman interviews with a bunch of intellectual celebs who don't believe in God. Why should we care? That's the unanswered question here.

I suppose if push came to shove I would have to say I was an Atheist - but I hate labels. I don't have a god shaped hole in my life (the last time I looked) and believe that religion is a semi voluntary prison of the mind. I have no particular beef with any religion, but if I had to illustrate my point it would an image of thousands of worshippers all bowing in unison in a mosque. But examples of such depressing prostrations are not unique to Islam.

I am most sympathetic to Ben Goldacre's answer:

I just don't have any interest either way, but I wouldn't want to understate how uninterested I am. There still hasn't been a word invented for people like me, whose main experience when presented with this issue is an overwhelming, mind-blowing, intergalactic sense of having more interesting things to think about. I'm not sure that's accurately covered by words such as "atheist", and definitely not by "agnostic". I just don't care.

Inevitably, the stars of the Atheist cosmos deliver mind numbing sermons on why they don't believe - though AC Grayling is uncharacteristically to the point:

I do not believe that there are any such things as gods and goddesses, for exactly the same reasons as I do not believe there are fairies, goblins or sprites, and these reasons should be obvious to anyone over the age of ten.

That's fine - short, to the point. Let's move on... Don't let God take up too much of your time, AC. That's more grooming time right? A number of the respondents like Grayling have a dig at 'childish' beliefs: this just isn't very interesting, and does not explain religious belief at all. It's a knee jerk analysis or worse. Tsk tsk - very lazy.

Professor Dawkins naturally cannot resist the whole shebang - again. Here we get the apotheosis of patronising:

Any theist who appeals to "design" of living creatures simply betrays his ignorance of biology. Go away and read a book. And any theist who appeals to biblical evidence betrays his ignorance of modern scholarship. Go away and read another book.

Oh really - that's enough to make you rush to the nearest church and embrace the Trinity. Dawkins is a wonderful science writer and I admired 'The God Delusion' - it hit the deluded theistic spot at precisely the right time. But time, like the machine of evolution, moves on... The argument from design may be profoundly annoying to Dawkins but the mechanism of natural selection is extremely complex. For the many of us who have not had a scientific education, the sometimes baffling complexity of life as well as the mystery of its origins (not yet explained by evolutionary biologists) can indeed be misleading. This won't be solved by such pietist formulae like 'Go read a book...go read another book.' Like Paley's famous watch, the apparent design of nature is highly seductive: we need to do a lot more than 'read a book'.

In fact long before Dawkins came along, the great philosopher David Hume had demolished 'theism from design' using logic rather than biology. But my point is that - contempt is no answer to the emotional appeal of illusory design. It is a shame to see the 'Go read a book' nonsense being dragged out yet again.

For God's sake.

BBC The Hour

2011-07-27T12:51:00.003+02:00

I have watched two episodes of the new BBC drama series The Hour - what a terrific idea to plunge us into a current affairs news room as the Suez crisis unfolds.
Sadly, the result is disappointing - suggesting that the BBC drama department has not yet cracked the code of the big American shows like The West Wing, Mad Men and The Wire.
The Hour is cleverly cast and looks good. Although it is set in the mid '50s, the first show brought back my own experiences at the now demolished media Gormenghast Lime Grove many decades later.
The problems are in Abi Morgan's writing and story construction. There is an exasperating excess of non dramatic and repetitive gushing between the main characters. As a viewer, hoping to caught up in the drama, this tic is very frustrating and wastes the talents of some excellent actors.
No one it seems has asked the basic question drilled into everyone who attends Robert McKee's Story seminars - what is the arc of a scene? How do the dramatic beats move the audience to a different narrative place at the end of every single scene?
The Hour fails this test much too often. Who read the scripts?
As a consequence of such inertly structured scenes, it is almost impossible to believe in the most important characters. They resemble 'speech dummies'.
At another level, there are far too many implausible plot ingredients. For example, a great deal of plot hinges on the character of Ruth the debutante who gets a symbolic nose bleed in Ep 1. When she lectures Freddie Lyon (Ben Wishaw), the stroppy young journo from a red brick uni, about the great conspiracy that infests British society, her views, from a story telling point of view, fall on barren ground. She is not entitled to them - as Deep Throat, say, is in 'All The President's Men'.
The Ruth problem fatally undermines the unfolding plot. Since the character of Ruth has not been provided with necessary narrative grounding, her suicide is a story dud. Although at the end of the second episode, we are intrigued by the revelation of the Elms' family movies - this kind of scene has come too late.
I should emphasise that my comments are not about 'story theory' but an attempt to explain why so much of The Hour simply didn't work for me as a viewer.
I was also unconvinced by the improbable, sub Hitchockian scenes that led to the murder of the character of the Egyptologist with a deadly secret. I suspect that the murder came much too early to have the impact it should have done. This character was a nice touch - but spoilt by the writing and rather cheesy direction.
Similarly Freddie's discovery and then exposition of the crossword to his producer/confidant The Hour's producer Bel Rowley code was horribly clumsy.
These two episodes of The Hour were littered with scenes that failed to convince: and that's fatal. Take, for example, the intriguing character of Angus McCain who pops up at key moments to bend the BBC to the will of the Eden government. Again an idea with such promise - and yet botched in the crucial confrontation between McCain and Bel, who wins out much too easily. This rang very false.
That's my impression of two episodes - and I will be watching the rest. Who knows?
It's inspiring to see BBC drama tackling our contentious past. It's a shame that - so far - they have fallen a long way short.

Sinking Singapore, the strange story of the SS Automedon

2011-07-26T15:57:00.004+02:00

Who wrote this - and about whom?

'The story of that struggle cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate or overcome... Those who have met [him]...have found a highly competent, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.'

Well that was Winston Churchill talking about 'Herr Hitler' in a book called 'Great Contemporaries'.
In some previous posts, I commented on Max Hastings' brilliant account of Churchill at war - and the fact that although the author frequently likes to use the word 'great' to describe his subject, Churchill emerges as stupid, incompetent and racist.

I have recently returned from Malaysia where I talked to Novista TV about their new documentary on the Japanese occupation of British Malaya after the lightning attack that overwhelmed SE Asia at the end of 1941 - 70 years ago. The humiliating defeat of the British, which heralded the end of the biggest empire the world has ever known, has often been blamed on incompetent local commanders who allowed the Japanese to overwhelm the Gibraltar of the East - Singapore. In fact, Singapore was no fortress and had in effect been abandoned by the British government - led in dictatorial style by Churchill.

A crucial reason for this stunning turn of events was a pervasive contempt for the Japanese. Right up to the moment Japanese aircraft rained death and destruction on the Philippines and Pearl Harbour, and their infantry and tanks roared onto Bachok Beach, Kota Bharu in northern Malaya, many Europeans regarded these fanatical soldiers as short sighted dwarves who could not fly their Zero fighters at night and would simply be swatted aside. The racist trail leads straight back to 10 Downing Street and the man who called Gandhi a 'half naked fakir'.

One of the most surprising and perplexing incidents that played a part in the fall of Malaya and Singapore seven decades ago concerned a leaking old tub called the SS Automedon. A year before the Japanese attack on SE Asia, this 20 year old 7500 ton Blue Funnel steamer, capable of just 14 knots, was chugging towards the island of Sumatra on its way to Penang and Singapore. On 11 November, the SS Automedon had the misfortune to run smack into the German surface raider 'Atlantis' somewhere between the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Atlantis had an enviable attack record having sunk or captured 22 ships. A boarding party led by Lt. Ulrich Mohr attacked and boarded the ship - killing the captain and two of his officers.

According to one survivor:

On the 11th of November 1940 my Uncle Alec was serving as an 18-year-old steward on board the Blue Funnel ship SS Automedon. The ship was destined for Singapore and sailing up the Indian Ocean. At around 11 am the German surface raider Atlantis sighted her. A shot was fired across Automedon’s bows but she did not stop. Atlantis then fired at the bridge because Automedon was transmitting an SOS. The whole of the bridge was blown up and all the officers were killed including the captain W.B. Ewan.

Uncle Alec had been situated on deck below and to the rear of the bridge when the shelling occurred and he was severely wounded in his upper body and head. Automedon was then boarded by the Germans who searched the ship for important documents and parts of the cargo that could be useful to them. They were certainly delighted to find large amounts of whisky and cigarettes in the holds. The Germans transferred the crew to Atlantis and Uncle Alec and the rest of the wounded were put on stretchers and hauled across to the German ship.

In the chart room of the SS Automedon, Lt Mohr soon made a remarkable discovery - a heavy, dark green Foreign Office bag with brass eyelets marked 'Safe Hand - British Master Only'. Evidently, the bag was designed to be quickly disposed of in the event of an emergency: but the German attack had been so swift and ruthless that the Captain had no opportunity to throw it overboard before he and his officers were shot dead. The captain of the Atlantis Bernhard Rogge spoke excellent English and was naturally intrigued by the Foreign Office bag. It did not take him long to realise that he had stumbled (or whatever the nautical equivalent) on a treasure trove. Inside the bag was an envelope addressed to the Commander-in-Chief Far East, Singapore, Air Chief Marshall Sir Robert Brooke-Popham... 'To be opened personally'. The envelope contained a document marked 'Highly Confidential - to be destroyed'.

As soon as he began reading their 'Secret Ultra' document, Rogge realised that he was holding in his hands the equivalent of a diplomatic 'wunder waffen'. The document, apparently prepared a few months earlier in August, was a brutal assessment of the likely impact of Japanese aggression in Britain's Far Eastern territories: Hong Kong was 'insignificant' and would be abandoned; Borneo was indefensible; Malaya and Singapore could not realistically be defended against Japanese attack. It would due highly unlikely that a back up naval fleet could be detached from the European theatre of war and sent to the Far East. For these reasons, an 'open clash' with the Japanese must be avoided until Britain could be assured of American support. To back up these depressing conclusions, the secret document provided detailed assessments of British naval and air resources and the Singapore defences.

Why the British Foreign Office had entrusted this crucial document to an antiquated merchantman has never been explained. It certainly astonished Rogge - 'What the devil were the British about? We could not understand it' he wrote later.

Japan was, of course, an Axis ally and Rogge acted quickly - he commandeered a captured Norwegian tanker the Ole Jacob and assigned a skeleton German crew with orders to steam to Japan and hand over the documents to the German Embassy in Tokyo. The ole Jacob arrived in Kobe on 4 December and the British secret documents were handed over to the German Naval Attaché who despatched the report to Berlin where it was shown to Hitler. From the Reich Chancellery the document was sent to the Japanese Naval Attaché in Berlin - who in turn sent a signal to Tokyo on 12 December. To begin with, tVice Admiral Nobutake Kondo was dubious - he wondered whether this astonishingly detailed assessment of British imperial weakness was a German trick to entice them into the war. But when the circumstances of the discovery were explained by the Germans, Kondo was convinced that a remarkable stroke of good fortune had unlocked the door to Pacific conquest. According to the British Foreign Office itself, the Empire was practically defenceless - the Japanese had only the neutral Americans to be worry about as they made plans to expand their own empire across SE Asia and the Pacific.

As a direct consequence of the German raid on the SS Automedon and the capture of the secret documents, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto reinforced the fleet intended for the attack on Pearl Harbour, Hawaii - knowing that the Japanese Imperial Army in could cut through British defending forces in Malaya and Singapore like a samurai sword through melting butter.

By the end of 1940, British intelligence must have known that the damning secret Foreign Office report had fallen into enemy hands. And yet no warning was ever issued to Brooke-Popham - and nothing was done to reinforce 'Fortress Singapore'. Nor did Churchill confess the loss to American President Roosevelt, even though the long term implication of the report was that Japan's sole concern in the Pacific would be American forces based in the Philippines and Hawaii.

Doctoral dishonesty

2011-07-15T02:15:00.003+02:00

In the week that the Guardian newspaper played a vanguard role in the toppling of the Murdoch hegemon and news that News International has withdrawn its bid to own BSkyB, we discover that another German politician took the plagiary route to a doctorate. Readers will recall blogs on other perpetrators - namely, former defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and MEP Silvana Koch-Mehrin. Shame on them.

In the week, that the German press castigated British newspapers for their supine relationship with the Murdoch empire, reflect for a moment on the meaning of this new scandal. The PhD is a German invention - becoming a Dr is a crucial rite of passage that guarantees wealth and power. When I was researching my new book Hitler's Foreign Executioners, I was astonished by the number of 'Doktoren' who eagerly took a lead role in the Holocaust. Many of the officers who served with the SD Einsatzgruppen had doctorates; the former SS anthropologist whom I interviewed for my first book was 'Dr' Bruno Beger.

What is astonishing about the new Doctorate scandal in Germany is that the perp namely MEP Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, who -- er graduated from the University of Bonn is blaming St Anthony's College, Oxford University - where he had the means and privilege to study in 1995. Apparently, 'Dr' Chatzimarkakis claims, using unacknowledged chunks from other sources is normal practice at St Anthony's.

What mendacious cowardly nonsense, 'Dr' Chatzimarkakis.

I wonder if the crusading journalists of the German press - who I note have never achieved the impact of the Guardian investigation into News International - will take up the sickness that plagues the German PhD market.

More on BBC, Primarck

2011-06-29T09:51:00.002+02:00

I see that the Telegraph has published a long whinge about the BBC complaints process by Paul Lister general counsel and company secretary, Associated British Foods.

I think that means Mr Lister works for Primarck. He was clearly directly involved in the 'faked footage' affair.

Mr Lister's main points can be summarised as follows: it is hard to take a complaint to the BBC, the BBC is too powerful. I am sure that the Telegraph's decision to give Mr Lister so much page space has nothing at all to do with the Murdoch inspired campaign to diminish the BBC - along with Rolls Royce, one of the jewels in the crown of British manufacturing - cultural manufacture that is.

I should say that I cannot be certain whether this footage allegedly showing children working on Primarck products that Primarck complained about was faked or not. The BBC has now pled guilty. Panorama may have been duped by a freelance reporter - we don't know. How can we be certain that the evidence of 'fakery' was not itself faked?

As Steve Hewlett put it:

'The BBC Trust's finding against Panorama and in favour of the cheap clothing giant Primark will come as a comfort to big business and powerful vested interests everywhere. Primark is cockahoop, gleefully spinning the trust's finding that a key sequence featuring child labourers in Bangalore was "more likely than not … not authentic" as evidence the whole report was wrong – which plainly it was not.'

But there are much bigger questions that go beyond this Panorama and Primarck.

It goes without saying that the BBC must uphold the highest standards of reporting. But at the same time, the BBC has a responsibility to take on difficult stories, that may involve companies like Primarck.

Any decent journalist will 'get into scrapes' (as Hewlett puts it) with the powerful - who would prefer that their activities whatever they are remain secret.

Panorama's exposure of the corrupt world of FIFA and its dictator Sepp Blatter, based on a long term investigation by Andrew Jennings, has withstood the test of intense critical scrutiny by a ruthless international organisation. The BBC stood firm against government pressure to censor the programme in the hope of pleasing FIFA.

Mr Lister wants to be the maligned David here - with the BBC as a mendacious Goliath. That's absurd. Primarck is a massively powerful company that peddles cheap clothes made in Third World countries. As a British or European consumer, I want ethical transparency when it comes to consumer practices in a fragile economy. I want the best broadcaster in the world to take a long hard look at the values of major producers like Primarck. The BBC also made a series of excellent documentaries called 'The Foods that Made Billions': these programmes revealed in startling detail how food manufacturers con consumers. None of the food giants has complained - as far as I know. In the post Primarck climate, would the BBC commission a series like this again?

From my own limited experience of broadcasting watchdogs like the Broadcasting Standards Commission now Ofcom, which I have discussed in other blogs, I would suggest that the 'watchdog' was biased in favour of the complainant not the BBC. That is appropriate. A serious complaint about a broadcast should receive a proper, impartial hearing. In the case of our Horizon programme, the BSC carried out a rigorous investigation at the end of which we programme makers came face to face with the complainants, who were given ample opportunity to make their case.

I want to see an objective analysis of the BBC/Primarck story - one that respected the existing and very effective apparatus of standards codes that in my experience everyone working for the BBC must respect.

Volkswagen - the dark side

2011-06-28T09:26:00.003+02:00

When I noticed headlines about the dark side of Volkswagen my immediate thought was - Adolf Hitler.

The global popularity of charming little Beetle cars has always left me cold. It was Hitler who designed the Beetle prototype with Ferdinand Porsche as a 'people's car' = Volks Wagen. Volk here meant something specific: remember the Nuremberg perorations 'Ein Volk, Ein Fueher...?' This was the German people - or at a stretch 'Germanic' peoples - with all impurities removed. In fact another word for Volk would be Race. So there you go - Race Cars, and that doesn't mean speed records.

Hitler was in modern parlance a petrol head. He loved cars and used Mercedes to symbolise his status, and to speed from meeting to meeting spreading his message of hate. His first purchase when he left Lansberg prison in 1925 was to purchase a new Merc at a discount. Hitler made the Mercedes the car of choice for dictators - but he bribed the German Volk with the tantalising thought of owning a modestly priced family car: the proto Beetle. It was the National Socialist state that set up the vast Wolfsburg automobile works that spews cars all over the world today.

After Hitler's downfall, his cars drove on... The British got Volkswagen going again and thanks to American investment in building a strong West Germany, German cars conquered the world. The poor suckers in the East got the Trabant. Hitler would be very pleased - it is perhaps a point Robert Harris missed when he conceived 'Fatherland'.

Volkswagen - Hitler's car company - is a vast behemoth that owns Seat, Porsche, Skoda etc. etc in a greedy empire of manufacture. It often proclaims the 'green' qualities of its 'blue motion' technology. Now Greenpeace has accused VW of being the least green car manufacturer. Their evidence looks very sound.

I have always suspected that the 'green car' is a myth. Emissions figures refer only to what is shat out of the back of the car - not to the total emissions cost of making the car in the first place. The news about Volkswagen is only surprising because the company makes such a song und dance about its environmental conscience/ In fact, electric or hybrid cars are simply a new way of persuading you to trade in your old petrol or diesel model --- and buy new cars!

Our planet is an automobile junk yard. Most of the time you are moving around a volume of air - how often do you see cars being used to capacity? Ideologues like Margaret Thatcher and manufacturers like VW have downgraded public transport, making the decision to catch a bus or train or use a bike as somehow demeaning. (In Toronto they call trams loser cruisers - so much better to sit in a traffic jam.)

I saw a new documentary recently called 'The Light Bulb Conspiracy'. The film excoriated Apple and the like for exploiting 'built in obsolescence', forcing consumers to buy, buy buy new products... The documentary had a short sequence about Henry Ford, but for some reason neglected to look at the modern auto industry, which depends on a perpetual recycling of cars. The wealth of VW and others rests on the foundation of the scrap heap. What self respecting consumer would drive a car older than two years?

VW will no doubt respond to Greenpeace by polishing its green credentials. It has always used the best advertisers and spin doctors. But remember - the car is never green.

Join the rebellion here.

Gaza convoy

2011-06-26T15:21:00.002+02:00

A second 'Gaza Convoy' has now set off for the Middle East to challenge the Israeli blockade. In the Guardian writer Alice Walker explained her motivations for joining the convoy:
As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc, is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

It would not be appropriate to dismiss out of hand Ms Walker's commitment. No one in their right mind would wilfully deny to ordinary Palestinians the right to freedom, safety and equal political rights. But we must also acknowledge that another misfortune of Palestinians is to endure the leadership of fanatical individuals dedicated to the violent destruction of the state of Israel and its people, and to promoting the vile prejudice of anti-Semitism. My book Hitler's Foreign Executioners explains how Haj Amin el-Husseini among others exported German racist doctrine to the Middle East after the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. Hamas is backed by a Holocaust denying regime in Iran - and must bear responsibility for inflicting such pain on the people it claims to represent and, I suppose, defend. The basic decency of the Palestinians is grossly undermined by the racial hatred promoted in its schools and by its fractious government.

I would also ask - why Gaza now? The so called Arab Spring has promised much and, thanks to the forces of reaction embedded in Middle Eastern regimes, delivered very little - so far. As Nick Cohen argues in The Observer today, Israel's neighbour Syria is a vicious apartheid regime that is ruled by tyrant, Bashar al-Assad

'whose forces took 13-year-old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, burned him, mutilated him, shattered his knee caps, cut off his penis and sent his corpse to his parents as a warning against participating in opposition politics...'

It is very hard to understand the 'liberal' world view that is obsessed with the 'occupation' of Gaza - and ignores the vile regime to the north. Cohen is very good on our own hypocrisy:

'Western governments remain lost in the delusion that Assad is a potential reformer rather than an actual monster, on the sole grounds, as far as I can see, that he was once a student in London and that the drooling toadies of Vogue magazine hailed his glamorous wife as "the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies". They still cannot see him as an enemy.'

The momentous upheavals of the Arab Spring should have led liberal opinion to rebalance its view of the Middle East. That doesn't mean letting Israel (or any other nation) off the hook - but it does make it imperative to jettison the disturbing tendency to focus exclusively on the alleged 'crimes' of the Israelis.

Although crying 'anti Semite!' on every occasion a criticism is made of Israel is counter productive - I think liberal opinion makers should take a long hard look at their entrenched, unblanaced and reactionary responses to the Middle East - the whole of the Middle East.

Primarcked

2011-06-17T09:29:00.002+02:00

We should all support the makers of the Panorama documentary about Primarck - the producer Frank Simmonds and the very experienced reporter Dan McDougall who acquired the footage of children stitching Primarck products.

Read this excellent article by Roy Greenslade.

I must declare a personal stake in this matter. Some years ago, I made a film for BBC Horizon about the 'alternative' historian Graham Hancock. At the time the Horizon was made Hancock was riding high on on expensive Channel 4 commissions thanks to gullible commissioner Charles Furneaux. Horizon had a good record of forensically examining the claims of the alternative community - they made a superb film about Erich von Däniken which trashed the Swiss hotelier's evidence for 'ancient astronauts'. Hancock was essentially von Däniken sans spaceships - but with a 'lost civilisation' to promote.

To cut a longish story short, when the film was transmitted Hancock and his colleague Robert Bauval complained first the BBC, then to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, now Ofcom.

It seems that in the case of the recent Panorama, it is the BBC Trust that has found against the Panorama investigation. When Hancock and co complained about 'Atlantis Reborn', the series editor was terrified. Although this individual had viewed the film some 14 times, often for 6 or 7 hours at a time, she decided that it had to be re-investigated. Hancock's compliant was very long - but focused on a rather obscure discussion of the topography of the Giza Plateau and the alleged match with three stars in the constellation of Orion. Hard to believe...

The Horizon editor fretted away at this point - slowly undermining the BBC's commitment to what it had broadcast. (If you want to know the ins and outs of this discussion I have written a detailed account in this book.)

The BSC found in Horizon's favour - but with a minor caveat about the 'Orion' kerfuffle. Hancock should have been given more time to respond. It was not that he hadn't been provided with opportunity - he simply didn't a more substantive bite.

The BBC decided to re broadcast the film - with a minor alteration to reflect this point. The main argument, as David Aaronovitch pointed out in the independent, remained inviolate.

Why are broadcasters so timid when it comes to defending their programme makers. Is it because the BBC is now dominated by an Executocracy anxious about their salaries?

Charging for images of mass murder

2011-06-09T09:24:00.025+02:00

I recently had to license some images from the Bundesarchiv here in Berlin. The web site offers an easy to negotiate portal to the archives - and a nice cart to facilitate the flow of your money.

I had no choice. In any case, AKG-images, also a German company, charges a lot more, as does the Bavarian State Library. But the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offers their images free of charge.

Some of the images I licensed from the Bundesarchiv are arguably general history - I chose a couple that showed Chancellor Hitler entertaining various heads of state such as the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu and the Croatian puppet dictator Ante Pavelic.

Others however had a direct connection to the Holocaust.

This means that a German archive is making money from the worst genocide in human history. I am not certain this is appropriate.

My proposal would be that images, photographs, propaganda posters held by German archives and so on should be free of charge if they pertain to the Holocaust. Sure, if I want to use a picture of that inspiring old democrat Bismarck, or Konrad Adenauer or Willy Brandt - yes, we should pay. But a photograph of mass killer SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski - please, show some decency.

German subs and Greeks

2011-06-09T08:58:00.031+02:00

I spotted a so far somewhat unreported story about the 'Greek crisis'. The German government and St Angela in particular likes to admonish 'the Greeks' for being lazy, retiring early and spending beyond their means.

This ugly kind of talk nicely skates over the fact that wealthy Greeks probably drive German cars and help drive up the profits of BMW and Daimler and the whole automobile shebang. The Germans can't have it both ways - their highly aggressive export industry enforces debt elsewhere in the EU.

What is truly astonishing is that the Greek navy purchased billion of Euros worth of submarines from the German company ThyssenKrupp (familiar name huh?).

The Wall Street Journal says:

The military deals illustrate how Germany and other creditors have in some ways benefited from Greece's profligacy, and how that is coming back to haunt them.

Now, the average Green citizen who will be forced to bear the burden of the European Union's punitive, German managed 'rescue' of Greece had nothing to do with the purchase of these submarines - and the frantic efforts to shed the order. We can imagine the kind of pressure put on the Greek Navy by Thyssen Krupp - and who knows, perhaps the deal was greased with some hefty bribes?

And yes - there is indeed a bribes story here. The WSJ again:

German prosecutors are investigating whether millions of euros in bribes were paid to Greek officials in connection with the sub deal. In May, the chief executive of one of the German companies helping to build the submarines, called Ferrostaal AG, resigned amid the probe.

Somehow the combination of greed and flatulent pseudo moral pontificating makes me feel I have been poisoned by the E. coli bug.

Fatherland

2011-06-07T08:53:00.115+02:00

I re-read Robert Harris's Fatherland last week. It's very good - the best and I suppose first of a rash of 'Berlin Noirs'.

'Fatherland' is grippingly plotted, of course - but it's the sheer intelligence of the imagined detail that impressed me most this time round. I wasn't sure about 'Queen Wallis' (implying that the supposedly pro German, former Edward VIII took the throne after Britain's defeat) but the shape of a future Europe dominated by a victorious Germany remains convincing. The Europe of 'Fatherland' is mischievously close to our own dear European Union - an idea first hatched up by tame German intellectuals in the 1930s. The main lesson learnt by the architects of the 'new Germany' was that you didn't need to wage war to achieve hegemony. Ruthless business practice and low real wages proved a lot more effective.

It's intriguing to think of an SS College in Oxford - which would fit with Heinrich Himmler's ambitions for his elite 'state within a state' and one wonders whether Hugh Trevor-Roper might have been persuaded to take the top job.

There is a clever play on the identity of 'President Kennedy' (in fact the nasty anti-Semitic dad not the Camelot son) whose planned visit to Berlin is the background to Harris's plot. Germany wants reconciliation with the United States to help win an un-winnable war with 'terrorists' in the East. We can imagine that if Harris returned to the story he might find a role for cult American novelist Ayn Rand.

The details of Harris's plot are fuelled by a sharp journalistic grip on history.

The brilliance of the book is that its plot revolves around the 'mysterious' fate of European Jews and the discovery of documents about the 1942 Wannsee Conference called to finalise details of the 'Final Solution'. There is a wonderful recurring motif of Xavier March's precious photograph of the Weiss family that once lived in his apartment and left this single emblem of their existence hidden in the wallpaper. Although we know that British intercepts of German coded messages had revealed the activities of the SD Einsatzgruppe murder squads in Eastern Europe - Winston Churchill referred to a 'crime without a name' - it is likely that a German victory would have given ample opportunity for the SS to destroy or cover up the evidence of the most abysmal crime in human history - as indeed they attempted to do in 1944.

One of Harris's most brilliant coups concerns memorialisation. I experienced a genuinely vertiginous shock when I read this chapter. Harris imagines that as German armies pushed into the East they uncovered the relics the Soviet terror - beginning, of course, in Katyn. In 'Fatherland', German children are taught about the crimes of Stalin and the Gulag in precisely the same way that they/we are now taught about the Holocaust. As well as massive memorials to Wehrmacht soldiers, a traveller in Harris's occupied East would be able to visit a chain of German built memorials to the victims of Stalin stretching towards the Urals.

I don't believe that Harris has succumbed to relativising the crimes of the Soviet regime and the Holocaust. What he makes clear is that memorialisation is a political not a moral process. Memorialisation serves not the moral order but the state.

One problematic aspect of 'fatherland' is anti-Semitism. The plot hinges on discovering the truth - or some of the truth - about the 'Final Solution'. But none of the characters appears to articulate anti-Semitic sentiments. I suppose that the logic of this is that the enactment of the 'Final Solution' extinguished such sentiments - but is that likely? I would have hypothesised that the 'terrorist threat' from the East would have provoked propagandist references to the 'Jewish-Bolshevik' menace. Remember Hitler's order to Himmler to 'eliminate Jews as partisans'.

So 'Fatherland' - a damn good read, and thought provoking too...

The Plague cometh: cucumbers? Bean sprouts?

2011-06-01T16:14:00.002+02:00

Germany is still a frightening place to be at the moment... The potentially deadly enterohaemorrhagic E.coli 'EHEC' is rampaging down through Germany from the north. We discover from the BBC, a reliable source:

'In many instances, the gastrointestinal infection has led to Haemolytic-uraemic Syndrome (HUS), which causes kidney problems and is potentially fatal.

The RKI has confirmed 470 cases of HUS in Germany - almost 100 more than the number reported on Tuesday.

About half of the HUS patients in Hamburg clinics have suffered neural disorders three to five days after falling ill, such as epileptic fits and slurred speech...'

To begin with the RKI - Robert Koch Institute - fingered Spanish cucumbers. Suddenly no one was eating any cucumbers especially if they originated 'outside Germany'. The nasty E. coli thing rapidly evolved into a political football.

Cucumbers were definitely no longer cool.

Now we discover from the same prestigious institute that they got the wrong vegetable...

It's bean sprouts - in fact sprouts from a single farm. And today - probably not bean sprouts... Not that farm...

In fact, no body here currently knows how this life-threatening haemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) caused by bacterial infection is spread - they just know it's on the march and people are dying.

Sales of fresh tomatoes, lettuces and cucumbers have crashed. We are eating only frozen and tinned stuff.

Yes - it's frightening, medieval.

The disgraceful performance of the Robert Koch investigators reminded me of some rather shameful medical history. Robert Koch the 19th Century scientist that the RKI is named after is celebrated in Germany as the discover of the cholera bacillus.

Koch did not discover the cholera bacillus. Step forward Filipo Pacini - the real discover of the deadly Vibrio cholera.

Although Koch and his supporters enjoyed the fame of discovery for many decades, the cholera bacillus is now named for its real finder thus: Vibrio cholerae Pacini 1854.

Pacini's remarkable investigative work predated both the English Dr Snow's work on the mechanism of the spread of cholera and Koch's Nobel prize winning 'discovery' of the 'comma shaped' bacillus in 1884, which made him a national hero. To its credit the Berlin Cholera Commission of the Imperial Health Office reminded the world of Pacini's ground breaking work - but in Germany, no one noticed.

It goes to show that decent health care and nationalism just don't mix.

Netanyahu's borders

2011-05-25T16:08:00.000+02:00

According to Spiegel, the German press is having a field day attacking Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress - and his rejection of negotiating the pre-1987 Israel borders.

Here is the purportedly 'left leaning' Berliner Zeitung:

"Netanyahu has made the American president look like a fool, after he called for a peace agreement based on the 1967 borders. Netanyahu brushed him off in front of rolling cameras -- a stunning spectacle. But can it really be in Israel's interest to weaken its most important ally in this way? Netanyahu had his triumph in Washington, but his country will pay for it in the long run."

That sounds ominous. Germany will make Israel pay for Netanyahu's intransigence?

I have noticed that over the last couple of years, perhaps longer, the German intelligentsia has discovered Palestine. Now it's OK to berate the Israeli's for being nasty 'occupiers'. Like the Nazis perhaps? I am not sure if that wicked analogy has been made by a German journalist but we do know that Wolfgang Benz the head of the German Institute of Antisemitism (it's against) believes that alleged Islamophobia can be compared to the Holocaust. It can't.

Now all right thinking people want to see a workable peace settlement in the Middle East - meaning Israel/Palestine in this context. It may well be that Israel should consider withdrawing to the pre-1987 borders. A number of influential Israelis have urged their government to do precisely that. But there is nothing to be gained from provocatively insisting Israel make that concession when there is no concomitant pressure on the Palestinians and Hamas to recognize Israel and abandon the virulent Jew hatred they still espouse.

President Obama and perhaps the Cameron regime in London are in danger of muddling the so called Arab Spring with the Israel Palestine issue. They are not identical. It served President Assad's nefarious purposes to stir up trouble on the Syria-Israel border on Nakba day. Who is the real villain - the dictator or Israel?

There is a different message in the conjunction of peace talks and Arab unrest. Israel is the single democratic society in the Middle East. Its government is understandably concerned about the future Arab states that may emerge after the current turbulence. But Israel should, ironically, offer a beacon to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria - Israel has assimilated people from very different cultures, offering them true citizenship and, it should be said, security.

Israel is an argumentative and diverse society that promotes a diversity of opinion. Although the media love to point cameras at a handful of demented illegal settlers wittering on about Moses, Israeli society is by and large a progressive one.

The Arab states have no tradition of democracy. Israel has - and should be a model not a pariah.

Blame Marx and don't pass the ammunition

2011-05-23T16:22:00.000+02:00

I have had long debates - ok, arguments - with some old friends about Karl Marx's responsibility for the crimes of various 20th Century regimes proclaiming themselves Communist.

Somehow - it is claimed - a 19th Century German philosopher must be held to account for the Soviet terror, the horrors of the Pol Pot regime, the millions of victims of Mao Tse Tung...

and so on... That's quite a charge sheet.

At the same time, the 'blame Marx' brigade also like to point out that the poor old geezer was WRONG about the various prognostications he made concerning the future of Communism. He did not predict for example that it would be backward Tsarist Russia that would first be engulfed by the onward march of Communist revolutionaries. He predicted the demise of Capitalism: and yet it goes from strength to strength. And so on...

So Marx - both wrong, and yet still to blame for the hideous atrocities of Communism?

I suppose the issue of blame can be boiled down to a single phrase - the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.

This implies to be sure some kind of violent imposition of political rule by a single class that might well be bent on revenge. Even if it wasn't, the concept implies that other classes are excluded from power and thus unable to defend their interests, or lives.

Result - the Soviet Terror, the Cambodian killing fields, Chinese famines...

Of course, if you accept that this deadly little phrase is at the heart of the matter - the root of all evil - then you must - logically - accept that Marx came up with this idea precisely because another class, namely the property/factory owning middle or capitalist class, already dominated the working class - who, when Marx was thinking and writing, paid the price of subservience in both lives and chronic poverty.

He called that exploitation.

No one seems very interested in totting up the death lists of victims of capitalism - perhaps because there is no one to blame. Adam Smith?

However, we can't let Marx off the hook quite so easily. Two wrongs don't make a right.

When I read a new biography of Friedrich Engels, I was struck by way in which Marxist theory emerged so directly from German Hegelianism. You recall thesis - antithesis - synthesis from days of wine and roses at Uni?

Hegel was a profoundly, radically conservative thinker: his famous dialectics converged on the State, the synthesis, which he conceived in quasi religious terms.

Engels and Marx took over the idea of historical dialectics and re-conceived them leading towards a different synthesis - yes, correct - the dictatorship of the proletariat.

So is Hegel to blame?

Political scientist Emmanuel Todd might agree. In a forthright exchange with Spiegel journalists, he says:

SPIEGEL: Where do you draw the boundary of the West?

Todd: In fact, only Great Britain, France and the United States, in that historic order, constitute the core of the West. But not Germany.

SPIEGEL: Are you serious?

Todd: Oh, it's fun to provoke a representative of "the German news magazine." What I'm saying is that Germany contributed nothing to the liberal democratic movement in Europe.

SPIEGEL: What about the Hambach Festival in 1832, the March Revolution in 1848, the national assembly in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt, the 1918 November Revolution, the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, (former Chancellor Konrad) Adenauer's integration with the West and the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 brought about peacefully by the people?

Todd: Okay, the postwar history is all very well and good, but it had to be put into motion by the Western Allies. Everything that happened earlier failed. Authoritarian government systems consistently prevailed, while democratic conditions had already predominated in England, America and France for a long time. Germany produced the two worst totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. Even the greatest philosophers, like Kant and Hegel, were, unlike David Hume in England or Voltaire in France, not exactly beacons of political liberalism. No, Germany's immense contribution to European cultural history is something completely different.

Not only Karl's fault then?

New Blog

2011-05-23T15:51:00.001+02:00

There are new blogs here... please join the debate.

And buy the book...

Sharing the earth with Osama bin Laden

2011-05-05T15:29:00.000+02:00

It would be appropriate to reveal that Professor Lipstadt's book about 'The Eichmann Trial' discusses not only Martin Buber's plea to spare the life of Adolf Eichmann but also Hannah Arendt's justification for judicial execution.

Lipstadt notes that Arendt 'supported the death penalty imposed upon Eichmann, though she disagreed with the court's rationale for it...' She argued that Eichmann should have been found guilty not of crimes against the Jewish people, but of crimes against humanity - carried out on the body of the Jewish people.

Arendt goes on:

'just as you [Eichmann] carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations [sic] - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. That is the reason and the only reason you must hang...'

This seems to be to be merely an elegant re-versioning of the conventional rationale for exercising the death penalty. My argument contra would be as follows.

Both Adolf Eichmann and 'his superiors' and Osama bin Laden and his associates most of whom are still at large committed grossly murderous actions that expressed profound and radical contempt for the values of human civilisation.

For this reason, when such individuals can be brought to account, the values of our civilisation should be reiterated and reinforced. Taking another life is not only pointless in a pragmatic sense, but reaffirms the kind of anti humanist values espoused by individuals like Eichmann and bin Laden - and of course so many others.

Execution is the way and habit of the despot. Mimicry has no moral value.

The witch is dead

2011-05-04T10:25:00.001+02:00

Only those who were in New York City on September 11, 2001 can completely understand the jubilation that erupted after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden was dead. 'Testament to the greatness of our country...'

Now though is the time for some tough minded reflection.
Coincidentally when the news about bin Laden was announced, I was reading Deborah Lipstadt's superb new book about 'The Eichmann Trial' - and noted Jewish philosopher Martin Buber's plea to David ben-Gurion that Eichmann should not be executed. Buber said: 'What the Torah teaches us is that none but God can command us to destroy a man.'
Well, I have no idea what god thinks - but I oppose the death penalty in all cases. A judicial killing is still a murder. And that in my view applies without exception - yes, even at Nuremberg.
Now two days after President Obama's announcement, the CIA has admittd it misrepresented the unfolding of events at the bin Laden residence. He was not armed... He was not using his better half as a human shield and so on... We now know that Obama had vowed to 'kill bin Laden'. What is your definition of murder?
I ask - why was murder the only option? Do we not have international courts that would have methodically delineated bin Laden's crimes and then determined an appropriate punishment?
I assume that for many people these frankly shameful revelations about the operation in will not change minds. Bin Laden deserved his fate. But no, Mr. President, Justice has not been done.
The murder of Osama bin Laden - for that is surely what this was - 'It was a kill operation' according to one American operative - will become an event as iconic as the destruction of the World Trade Centre and the mass murder of more than 3000 people nearly ten years ago.
Few can imagine that the killing of Osama bin Laden will bring the end of the 'war on terror' or significantly undermine Al-Qaida. Experts on global terrorism have repeatedly pointed out that bin Laden was not the main architect of 9/11 and that Al-Qaida was never a unitary terrorist army. It was a loose collection of the fanataical and the disaffected. In short, it had no 'head' to cut off... It is unlikely that bin Laden had any significant role in global terrorism - he was no longer giving orders, if he ever had.
This 'killing operation' was more akin to a kind of ritual sacrifice - an appeasement. I admired Barack Obama as a presidential candidate - in office, he has been a disappointment. Since it would seem that bin Laden had been 'hiding in plain sight' for some time, President Obama might have made a political decision to 'bring him down'.
When the jubilation fades, and the various reworkings of the story must already be cooling passions - then we will see that the global landscape has changed very little.
The witch is dead to be sure - unfortunately the coven will now seek retribution.

Government by estate agent

2011-04-27T18:39:00.001+02:00

What kind of egregious everyday person does George Osbourne remind you of??

I spent some of today, well a few minutes, racking my brains - trying to answer this question.

And then it came to me...

An estate agent!

How many times have you met an estate agent outside some rotting property and been assured that the wreck he or she wants you so desperately to buy is really a most desirable property with original features, and well worth that $500,000 you would need to shell out.

Looking at the recording of Osbourne repeating the dumb mantra that the economy has grown... the economy has grown... by... 0.5%... I realised that the Chancellor must his inspiration from those high street charlatans. My impression that this is a cabinet of estate agents was confirmed by Cameron's horrible channeling of Michael Winner. Mad or just stupid?

It's probably a side splitting joke at a convention of estate agents, the most despicable people on our high streets.

The best response - maximum contempt.

How the future looks

2011-04-24T11:14:00.000+02:00

Occasionally I mull over the future. Is that a fatuous exercise - the future is surely chimerical. What can we be certain of?

I was inspired to reflect on this by Ian Jack's comment in the Guardian that the 'American Empire' was now, in 2011, roughly at the point Britain had descended to after 1945 - meaning of course the long slippery slope of decline. Bankrupted by war, letting go of imperial possession - in retrospect Britain should really have sunk into complete decrepitude long ago...

Somehow we hang on. We have a national addiction to self inflicted internalised schadenfreude - and yet in Britain's case the future is unpredictable. As T.E. Lawrence puts it to his Muslim friend Ali in David Lean's wonderful film 'Nothing is written.'

In broader terms, it is unlikely that Britain will be removed from its pivotal geo strategic position anytime soon. That's why I think Britain must engage with Europe but not fall into the trap of becoming entrapped in the Euro zone. Surely British governments have handled this delicate balancing act pretty well?

Jack's analysis of the American dilemma implies to me that the United States must indeed undergo a period of adjustment - to the immense and seemingly limitless expansion of Chinese power and wealth and to massive adjustments in Eurasia.

Germany is currently wary of its own political power. But imagine Europe in say 2025 or earlier. The axis of economic and political power will be drawn between Paris, Berlin and Moscow. Germany began the 20th Century anxious about its vulnerable position between the Russian Empire and France and unleashed two world wars in a bloodthirsty effort to solve that problem - in that sense the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich had much the same objectives. After visiting some of the sites of mass murder in Lithuania recently, I realised that we still have no explanation of the German genocide - the Holocaust. Was the planned destruction of European Jewry also a gruesome attempt to neutralise the threat of Bolshevik Russia?

Unified Germany is now the most powerful and wealthy nation in Europe. It is a hegemonic power whose famous exports dominate global markets. Millions of elite BMWs and Mercedes have been dumped on clogged Chinese roads. Germany's problem though is that it has a declining working population and a concomitant stacking of ageing pensioners. Germany's solution is in Russia, where there is underdeveloped industrial capacity and a huge potential work force. The guest worker will vanish - to be replaced by an empire of industrial plant in Eastern Europe and Russia. That process is of course well under way.

The Moscow-Berlin Axis will come to dominate Eurasia. Remember that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not just a political deal, carving up Eastern Europe between two dictators, but an economic deal too... How long will the Russian government tolerate German manufacturing hegemony on its own soil? When for that matter will the Chinese tire of German imports and make their own versions? Much to the disgust of Siemens they make their own locomotives!

Germany's problem with France has by and large been solved by the European Union - hence the frequent love ins between Sarkozy and Merkel. Since the emergence of Britain as a global power in the 17th Century, British foreign policy sought to prevent the emergence of a single dominate European power. We no longer have that kind of clout - thanks to two world wars. But if the American empire does not suffer the terminal decline predicted by Jack, Britain will still occupy an axial position between the United States and the Berlin-Paris-Moscow hegemon that will dominate Eurasia.

It is impossible to predict what that will mean in the long term - but that surely is the shape of the future, if not its detail.

New blog site

2011-04-16T09:35:00.000+02:00

I am starting up a new blog - the idea is to reflect on themes and places in my new book Hitler's Foreign Executioners.

I am currently in Vilnius - and talking about the destruction of the Jewish community here that followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941.

Cameron apologises for history

2011-04-06T10:33:00.000+02:00

PM David Cameron's no doubt opportunist comments that Britain was responsible for the ongoing conflict in Kashmir should provide ample scope for anyone interested in debating the value of history - History rather - in education. And in Cameron's world view, we Brits are it seems not just to blame for Kashmir but the majority of the world's difficulties:

“I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”

So that's what they teach at Eton? I think not.

Cameron's comments if they have any value reflect a non Whiggish view of our past. Instead of history unfolding steadily for the greater good of mankind, our British ancestors made mistakes with long term consequences.

I look forward to seeing this matter taken up by the German press. Here there is a continuous public apology for past misdemeanours usually embodies in memorial building. Quiet recently, we have had revelations about the role played by the German Foreign office in the Holocaust, and the fact that the West German government knew a great deal more than it has ever admitted about the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann before he was apprehended by Israeli agents. We now have a new exhibition at the German Historical Museum about the role of the German police in the Holocaust which reveals how many German policeman slipped back into civilian roles after 1945.

In my new book 'Hitler's Foreign Executioners', I argue that the German 'Order Police' was the one of the main agents that recruited non German anti-Semites to carry out the 'Holocaust by bullets' that engulfed occupied Eastern Europe after 1941.

My sense is that there is no longer much emotion attached to these revelations. For German academics who study these matters or curate Nazi period exhibitions the dark side of history provides a good career. For historians everywhere a decent job is hard to find. German history writing is as dry as cured concrete. Despite the stream of new information about the 12 year Reich, the past is a foreign country - and not at all painful to visit.

Cycling past the Berlin Holocaust Memorial yesterday and watching the school kids jumping from one grey concrete block to another I wondered again - what is this place for?

So - what is the value of an apology? What should we Brits say sorry for? and why?

I think the simple answer is nothing.

Apologies in everyday life are often empty gestures designed to plaster over past hurt and move on. This is meaningless in historical terms. Precisely apportioning blame is very tricky. I certainly feel shame when I think about the British participation in the Slave Trade, the Amritsar Massacre and the starvation policy sanctioned in India during the Second World War by Winston Churchill.

What about the Balfour Declaration that promised a national home to the Jews? Should Balfour be judged responsible for the history of the Middle East after 1917? That's clearly nonsense - or to be more precise meaningless.

I could go on... The Comments sections of newspapers reporting Cameron's apology are full of for and against responses listing events to apologise for.

Finally, its costs almost nothing to say sorry. Of course, the German government has paid out millions of reparation euros - but I am sure this was a price worth paying to sanctify German exports.

So Cameron's apology is essentially vacuous. There is no cut and dried way of 'mastering' the past. After all, how well do we understand history anyway?

Coalition world

2011-04-04T09:36:00.001+02:00

It is used to be smartly ironic to remark that Britain was 'a third world country'.

Now, thanks to the Tory coalition government, it really is one. Read this soul sapping report in the Independent this morning.

This is a disgrace. The proposed reform of the NHS is unnecessary and foolish.

Cameron and co, the people who got us into the mess in Libya and who created the conditions that kill people such as Sareena Ali and her daughter don't deserve the power they wield. This is Old Etonian morality on a lethal scale.

And where is the Opposition?

Oh to be in England

2011-04-03T10:37:00.000+02:00

Have you woken up to the fact that we have the worst government for 30 years? That is to say - since Thatcherism destroyed Britain's last long term hope by liquidating British manufacturing in a blind and stupid fit of rage?
And yes I agree New Labour made many destructive mistakes - but you ain't seen nothing yet.
The new Coalition government is malice and destruction writ large - slashing and burning to satisfy the ratings agencies, and perhaps the Germans who like to congratulate that walking tsunami Charles Osbourne for his austerity plans.
What finally made me realise the Coalition is blindly leading us all down the pot holed road to disaster is the news that the cuts regime is forcing yet more people to resort yet more often to plastic. We will spend our way out of the parsimonious foolishness of government cuts by reading for our credit cards.
Living on the never never thanks to the ridiculously relaxed regulations governing the use of 'personal credit' has become one British disease - and again yes, the Blair Brown government sanctioned this spending balloon too. For me this is one symptom of chronic decline too far.

History - for what of what?

2011-03-29T15:49:00.000+02:00

I've tried to keep up with the debate about teaching history in English schools but frequently feel like throwing up my hands in exasperated defeat. The spectacularly incompetent Education Secretary Michael Gove seems to be stage managing this farrago - his own history in charge of our children's intellectual well being looking increasingly like the battlefields of the Crimea.

Gove's puppet master role guarantees that debate is moulded by a Tory obsession with the 'values' of history - especially British history. The main plank of this values based argument is the notion that knowing historical facts ensures a proper and shared respect for 'British values'. What nonsense! Any decent historian knows that 'Britishness' is a chimera. Even before 1066 and all that, the inhabitants of the Isles now with a 'British' label slapped on had been transformed by successive visitors, invaders and colonisers into a mongrel breed, complete with a wonderfully mongrel language. The rise of Britain as a global power rested on foundations built by Dutch invaders at the end of the 17th Century.

That's one big problem. Another is even more fundamental. Why on earth should studying history be made compulsory? I have yet to see a reasoned justification for forcing kids to study history at any level - surely making them learn at least one other language, for example, would drag the United kingdom from its narrow minded monoglot rut.

National identity, and the history that purportedly sustains that identity is a shifting morass that is all too often used as a kind of pugilistic calling card by pedagogues with a secretive ideological agenda.

This naturally leads to another question - which is also occluded in this debate. What is history? The present debate reflects the obsessions of the debaters - both Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson trumpet narrow, self serving definitions of what constitutes history. For Ferguson, it's all about the killer app values of 'The West' which happens to be the subject of his new book and television series.

The only real answer that many historians have is that studying history is somehow good for you. Why? I challenge anyone to come up with an answer that is not completely vacuous.

Well I think there is an answer - and it can summed up in a single word. Curiosity.

Education should not be about moulding upright 'British' citizens imbued with a sense of the national narrative - as Gove demands. All teachers must be given the tools to fine tune curiosity - and that includes 'history teachers'. Obsession with the kind of curriculum so brilliantly satirised by Sellar and Yeatman in '1066 and All That' - i.e. linear facts with attached values - are fostering narrow not open minds.

Anyone teaching history must have the means and the courage to show that history never has a capital H and is an often bitterly contested terrain which reflects values but does not embody them. You will not make better citizens by rote learning of facts judged essential by some self satisfied, self glorifying committee of History Czars.

Now what is a Czar?

History is bunk - and it is simultaneously, gloriously something to think with. 1688 anyone?

Knut is dead

2011-03-21T09:13:00.001+01:00

The story of Knut the Berlin 'Eisbar' is a disturbing one. Google Knut - and the words dead, death come up just as frequently as 'lovable polar bear'.

For those who didn't follow this murky, disturbing story, Knut was a polar bear abandoned by his mother who became a kind of Berlin cult. Week after week thousands of Germans gathered outside Knut's shrine in the centre of Berlin to pay obeisance to his cuteness.

As he turned from pristine white to a muddy brown, and seemed to metamorphose into a grumpy adolescent, the obsession waned - but by then Berlin Zoo had made a killing. Its revenues increased ten fold.

The pressure generated by this peculiar celebrity soon had a deadly impact. Alongside Knut, his keeper the bearded and telegenic Thomas Dörflein also became a celebrity. To the delight of Knut's fans, he played the bear Elvis songs and massaged him with baby oil.

Yuk.

Dörflein's odd passion for Knut led to arguments with Berlin Zoo - even though the strange affair kept the crowds pouring in... and enriched the German media machine, which churned out scores of documentaries about the pair.

Germans seem to love polar bears more than say the unwelcome Turkish Guest Workers, now treated with disdain and contempt.

Then suddenly in September, 2008 Dörflein was dead. Speculation suggested he had committed suicide - in fact he died from heart disease. Even so, he was almost certainly under extreme pressure from the Knut media circus and hypocritical criticisms of his 'relationship' with a polar bear.

And now Knut himself is dead - no explanation so far offered.

It is hard not to feel that the obsessive Knut cult somehow had death as its end game - which would make Knut just the latest in a long line of Germanic death obsessions.

Fried Googlebergers

2011-02-27T06:01:00.000+01:00

The dirty business of the German Defence Minister's Doctorate cheating drags on... and so it should.

And now it looks a lot muckier.

It seems as if many Germans continue to find Googleberg an 'attractive figure'. I wonder why in a nation that is supposed to value meritocratic achievement. Guttenberg was as we Anglo Saxons say born with a silver spoon firmly embedded in his mouth - and now it seems that cheating comes very naturally to Karl-Theodor.

Why the persistence of respect for a cheat?

Well there is a partial answer. The German tabloid Bild organised a poll that at first sight seemed to show that the German public continued to back KTzG presumably seeing him as a kind of naughty school boy.

Now Spiegel reveals two pretty remarkable facts about the Bild business. First, that

an ongoing online poll on the newspaper's website found that 57 percent of the more than 680,000 surveyed wanted Guttenberg to step down.

This was not reported. The Bild Googleberg business does not end there. It now seems that the Defence Ministry has made a deal with Springer AG that owns Bild to run advertising campaigns to recruit for the German army the Bundeswehr which is now a volunteer force.

Cosy!

Remember that back stairs political deals ended with Germany becoming a pariah nation. Let's hope this is not the slippery slope.

Googlebergers

2011-02-22T06:51:00.001+01:00

So it seems that Karl-Theodor has read my Blog and done the half honourable thing - he's not taken an early bath as Defence Minister but 'resigned his PhD'.

So that's all right. Perhaps Karl-Theodor will be comparing notes with that other PhD Gillian Macbeth.

It just won't be Dr Googleberg any longer... Germany must defend itself without a doctorate.

What a shameful story. An insult to the noble tradition of the German Doktoren.

Why on earth did the former Dr Googleberg think he could get away with this? He wasn't writing his thesis in the dark ages before the internet. Checking documents for plagiary is now child's play.

I suspect that this story is far from over. How about this for disingenuous support:

"I appointed Guttenberg as minister of defence," [Merkel] told reporters. "I did not appoint him as an academic assistant or doctor. What is important to me is his work as minister of defence and he carries out these duties perfectly." (BBC)

Guttenberg - Schadenfreude

2011-02-19T08:34:00.001+01:00

I confess I have never found the German Minister of Defence Dr. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg as appealing as many Germans apparently do. Or appealing at all.

Germany has a poor record with aristocratic Ministers. One thinks to begin with of the former champagne salesman who bought, or used some other kind of skulduggery, to get a von in his name. For millions of Europeans and European Jews, the reign of Joachim von Ribbentrop was a tragedy. We now know that the German Foreign Office was deeply complicit in the Holocaust - and that after the war its a few of its tainted emissaries fermented anti-Semitic Jihadists in the Middle East.

That's merely history, of course. Let's turn back to the present.

There is always something deeply suspicious about glamorous political figures - especially ones who like posing with soldiers in foreign parts. Hitherto Defence Minister Guttenberg has survived some murky scandals mainly through deploying sheer teflonesque arrogance. He is after a German aristo - and, as we are frequently reminded, married to a Bismarck. What's in a gene?

What may undo Guttenberg - though he has a Berlusconi level of survival talents - is his Doctorate. This may bother Germans more than the Minister's other escapades.

Germany claims to have 'invented' the PhD and those blessed with these precious certificates like to proclaim their ownership as often and as publicly as possible. That may not be a bad thing: this is a meritocracy, though I suspect that Mama and Papa must help at least some aspiring doctoral students who have to somehow survive years of toil - or manic googling. I am sure you could measure prosperity levels in German cities by highlighting the 'Drs' emblazoned on street addresses. The case against 'Dr' Guttenberg has yet to be properly assessed and judged - but it doesn't look good. Typically he has chosen to deny wrong doing and brazen out this new scandal. This may prove an unwise strategy. The evidence as presented in the German press is already humiliating enough. Guttenberg has now given up his title until proved innocent, or not.

One wonders, given the status and wealth conferred by German PhDs, how many are really acquired honestly?

Goodbye Mubarak and good riddance

2011-02-11T18:35:00.000+01:00

So he's gone - and that must be welcomed.

I would also welcome a few strong notes or chords of caution.

It struck me as terribly ironic that the single democracy in the Middle East - and I mean Israel of course - did not welcome, indeed feared, the remarkable surge of popular protest against a dictator. But of course Israel fears an unfavourable re-balancing of power that might jeopardize the security of their southern border. But will a new Egyptian government really imagine it has anything to gain by sabre rattling outside its borders?

The Arab revolt will almost certainly spread beyond Egypt - into the Yemen and who knows where else? These nations fail most democratic tests, and breed sadistic dictators like Mabarak. It is not a matter of welcoming or supporting popular movements against repressive Arab regimes - but rather acknowledging that they can no longer be held back.

Democracy the lack of it is just one problem. Many of Middle Eastern nations are crippled by poverty and inequality. That must be addressed. But will it be?

In short will the Egyptian revolution be a good or bad thing? How will the map of the Middle East look in five years?

There are warning signs. That has to be faced. Because real democracy was crippled, the only way for Egypt to change was through the astonishing popular street uprisings we have seen in Cairo.

Now the Army is in charge. How will Egypt develop a genuine apparatus of democracy? Will the brave people of Tahrir Square face a new venal strongman in a few weeks?

Those who have a knee jerk reaction to anything done by Muslim peoples will no doubt point to the shadowy activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. But hearteningly the scenes in Cairo appeared to be secular - uniting Copts and Muslims - in colour - not Islamic.

But will the outcome be a repetition of the Iranian revolution. Who knows. No one.

But the Egyptians may want to learn some lessons in democracy - from Israel.

Bad science

2011-02-09T08:45:00.001+01:00

I haven't had proper time for weeks to blog - though the world has not stopped spinning...

I was struck by this comment by a Telegraph science writer, which is surely just bad science:

Toddlers fed a diet packed high in fats, sugars, and processed foods had lower IQs than those fed pasta, salads and fruit, it was found. The effect is so great that researchers from the University of Bristol said those children with a "healthier" diet may get an IQ boost.

What this 'finding' ignores is that the Pasta and Veg kids are getting a lot more input than just diet. Their lives will almost certainly be packed full of other stimuli that might have just as powerful an impact on their IQs.

It is shameful that Britain falls so low in the international league table for equality of opportunity. That is not the fault of our current Coalition, but the problem will get worse in Cameronland. We are being urged to launch a national campaign against the plague of dementia. We need also to address how and why so many of our children are being handicapped by the sickness of unequal opportunity.

Hurrah for Stalin

2011-01-22T09:34:00.000+01:00

I have just been reading the Guardian Review's article about Lillian Hellman by Sarah Churchwell.

I re read the following paragraph a number of times.

her politics were not always so admirable. Throughout the 1930s, Hellman, like many other Americans on the left, became an outspoken apologist for Stalin, even after the scale of his crimes began to be revealed. Many of her contemporaries found her later seizure of the moral high ground in her dealings with the HUAC understandably enraging, given her unrepentant Stalinism: she publicly supported the Moscow purge trials and continued to insist that Stalin had created "the ideal democratic state".

Now - try this thought experiment. Here's the same paragraph again, with a few words changed.

her politics were not always so admirable. Throughout the 1930s, Hellman, like many other Americans, became an outspoken apologist for Hitler, even after the scale of his crimes began to be revealed. Many of her contemporaries found her later seizure of the moral high ground in her dealings with the HUAC understandably enraging, given her unrepentant admiration for Hitler: she publicly supported the Nazi terror and continued to insist that Hitler had created "the ideal democratic state".

Would we be rushing to see the new London production of 'The Children's Hour' if my reworked paragraph actually described Hellman's political views. I think not.

But why is Hellman's admiration for Stalin, even after the destructive nature of the Soviet regime was exposed by the Show Trials, less morally repugnant than a passion for Nazism? We would rightly assume that anyone who espoused the latter had removed themselves beyond the moral pale. But we still indulge the blinkered idiots who found heaven in the Soviet Union.

It might just be possible to rationalise the position of people like Hellman on the grounds that the values she and others perceived in the Soviet Union were humanist ones, liberty, equality and so one... But that perception necessarily excluded, to take just one barbaric example, the Ukrainian famine that Timothy Snyder has so movingly brought to our attention in his book Bloodlands.

I think this argument is delusional.

It is the moral responsibility of any artist to seek the truth, however bitter and terrible. Clearly Hellman did not.

How the Tea Party thinks

2011-01-10T15:31:00.000+01:00

It would be easy to underestimate the political and moral values embodied in the career of American congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who was shot in the head at an open air meeting in Arizona. She was a dedicated politician - truly a democrat. Ms Giffords is gravely ill. We must hope that she recovers. But the gunman, wielding a Glock that he of course had obtained perfectly legally, ended the lives of six Americans, including a nine year old girl.

It would also be straightforward to represent the killer Jared Loughner and his accomplices as deranged loners and oddballs. Loughner certainly possessed enough of the traits. But he was not an 'outsider'.

Loughner in fact represents the old, dark side of America - and its dangerous violence obsessed right wing, now reinvigorated by the Tea Party (that is venerated by Daily Telegraph columnists) and the crazy house public utterances of Sarah Palin and her followers.

Palin is forever banging on about frontier values and celebrates the joy of shooting. She or someone with the same repellent values literally targeted Ms Giffords and other 'enemies of the people' - using a shameful graphic image of a gun sight and proposed liberal victims. Sure, this was electioneering metaphor - but as such not much less shameful. In American ideology violent imagery is never just metaphor. And it has terrible consequences.

Rabbi David Saperstein makes this point:

"...there can be no ignoring the increasing culture of violence in our nation and particularly in our political discourse. Dehumanizing language and images of violence are regularly used to express differences of opinion on political issues... language is too often heard by others, including those who may be mentally ill or ideologically extreme, to justify the actual use of violence."

Those who believe in some mythical 'American Jewish' lobby should note the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords was also an anti-Semitic act. As Israel Matzav emphasises in his Blog:

Ms. Giffords was the first Jewish congresswoman from Arizona, a point of pride for many at Congregation Chaverim. She did not attend services every week, and she only rediscovered her Jewish faith about a decade ago. But she is described as a dedicated member of the temple whose work and compassion embodied the best of Jewish practice....'

“My Jewish heritage has really instilled in me the importance of education and caring for the community,” she said in a 2006 interview with The Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. “I consider myself Jewish without any equivocation.”

I was in New York in the run up the Iraq war and I remember the chilling escalation of martial fever whipped up Fox News and all those reptilian radio jocks who are forever hungry for war.

This is a nation that cannot be weaned off the Gun nipple even by its liberals.

The Tea Party 'declared war' on President Obama. Tragically they have acquired their first scalps.

Thinking about memorials

2011-01-04T11:09:00.000+01:00

The new year dawned in Berlin with the usual percussive fireworks - loud enough to scare away evil spirits apparently. On Sunday morning, firework refuse was everywhere. The rule here about fireworks mimics canine hygeine in Berlin: don't clean up.

Germany is awash with triumphalism this year. The car factories are working overtime to further clog up the streets of Shanghai and Beijing - it's another economic miracle, riding on the lowered value of the Euro and low German wages. This economic chest swelling goes hand in hand with the new German patriotism - or is that nationalism?

And the arguments about memorials go on... As Bill Niven makes clear in his Blog, memorials have always been charged with conflict in Germany. When a memorial was inaugurated at the former Dachau concentration camp, it proved hard to find a big whig top to open it who wasn't somehow involved in the regime that constructed the place.

Here in Berlin, we have a renewed scrap about the memorial to the Sinti and Roma which is being built near the Reichstag. I have blogged before about the nearby Holocaust memorial and the generally unacknowledged discomfort it unintentionally expresses. It has been suggested that many Germans regard the memory of the Holocaust as an opportunity to seek and find Christian redemption. In this sense, the history of the genocide unleashed after 1939 is distorted rather than memorialised. And what is memorialisation anyway? Is it not a kind of frozen apology - that fails to account in any serious way for the perpetration of mass murder?

Spiegel blithely reports that:

[The Roma and Sinti memorial] was a complicated undertaking from the start. In 1992, the German government promised the Sinti and the Roma a memorial of their own, because the Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin was to commemorate the extermination of the Jews. Other victim groups were promised their own memorials.

The writer seems blissfully unaware of the cynicism and even callousness of this formulation - sorry we murdered half a million of your forbears, but not to worry - here's a memorial to make up for what our former government authorised...

Once the memorial's up, no need to think much about why those half a million Roma were killed.

This particular memorial has been designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan. According to the Spiegel report, the Berlin authorities led by 'memorial Tsar' Bernd Neumann have fallen out with the 'headstrong' Karavan... Quoting the Spiegel journo again: 'They also suspect that there is something else behind the "artist's constant requests for changes," namely that it is merely a way of demanding a higher fee and higher expenses in the end...'

Ah... so the Germans suspect this Israeli artist of merely grubbing for a fast buck? One wonders why they are so quick to make this judgement. Could it perhaps be motivated by much older stereotypes? Chancellor Merkel is keen to tell the world how 'strong' the German economy is - and yet they begrudge this world class artist business class fares and a night at the Philharmonie?

Herr Neumann should be a little more reflective before he denounces the Israeli designer of a memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma for asking for too much money.

A Thought, a question

2010-12-22T18:36:00.002+01:00

‘If a man crossed paradise in a dream and received a flower as proof of his passage, and on his awakening he found that flower in his hands, what should we say? I was that man.’

Coleridge

Hitler and the Germans

2010-12-07T17:02:00.000+01:00

On the day that a US Jewish organisation forced a Japanese store to remove a 'Nazi fancy dress' from its shelves, I visited the Hitler and the Germans exhibition at the German Historical Museum. After reports of overcrowding, the space was mercifully empty - with just a few clusters of schoolkids taking notes.

The exhibition is in many ways exemplary - superbly curated, meticulously organised and in many ways revealing. There are some striking curatorial gestures - like the cabinet of National Socialist uniforms for every occasion the display of childrens' letters to the Fuehrer.

I had some issues. One theme of the curators' account of Third Reich history is that when Hitler seized power, the violence embedded in his political world view was masked. In other words, most Germans had no idea what they were letting themselves and the world in for...

This begs the question - 'masked' from whom? I assume the curators mean ordinary German citizens, but this is rather vague and evasive. There were plenty of German voters who understood that National Socialist ideology implied violence on a massive scale. The basic political and racial policy statements made in 'Mein Kampf', which had been publicly available since the mid 1920s, hardly pull punches about the need to eliminate from the 'Folk Community' a host of undesirables - inevitable through violent action. Furthermore, there was huge constituency of NSDAP party faithful - many of whom had served in the First World War - who relished the chance to take revenge on the German Jews they believed blamed for Germany's defeat in 1918. We are often overly reverential about the Weimar period - in fact, it was laced with lethal anti-Semitism.

This brings me onto another line of thought that occurred to me inside the German Historical Museum. The curators seeks to provide a modern answer to the old question: Why were so many Germans willing to align their conduct with the »Führer« and thus actively support the Nazi dictatorship?

I don't think they succeed. The Exhibition is tautological - the explanation for Hitler is - Hitler. It adopts the myth of the Fuehrer as if it explained itself. The curators claim to represent Hitler in context, but the context remains wrapped up in Hitler.

The reason for this failure is that the Exhibition is still constrained by taboos. There are two that are worth stressing. It still seems very difficult for German historians to position the Third Reich in the contradictory flow of German history. The Third Reich evolved from the Kaiser Reich - and was nourished by the anti democratic and anti-Semitic mentality of the Weimar governments. Hitler revered Bismarck and co - and for good reason. They were his political forbears. Would Bismarck have refrained from cheering when Hitler's armies destroyed Poland in 1939?

The second unbroken taboo goes in the other direction - into the future. Although the Exhibition shows a few models of the 'Peoples' Car' the KdF, it backs away from reflecting on how much the Hitler period might be connected to the two new Germanies that emerged from the rubble after 1945. To what extent did the rapacious capitalism of the Reich, which enslaved the working peoples of occupied Europe, pave the way for the economic miracle of the next decade?

For all its virtues, this excellent exhibition remains trapped within a very conventional and timid view of the past - and present.

BBC versus FIFA

2010-11-30T16:16:00.000+01:00

The BBC must be congratulated for holding out against our estate agent style PM - who said that the transmission would be 'unhelpful' - and showing the excellent Panorama report on FIFA by Andrew Jennings.

Channel 4's 'Disptaches' documentary about child asylum seekers was similarly hard hitting about our Border Agencies.

Both docs provided a positive reminder about the power of television - as long as programme makers are free to speak to the truth without political pressure.

Andrew Jennings' courageous FIFA investigation was stomach turning. Among its many powerful insights was one provided by a visit to Amsterdam. FIFA imposes acceptance of draconian and anti democratic 'conditions' on nations that apply to and host the World Cup. The British government has not made these conditions or even their existence public - but Dutch politicians have. They are to be congratulated.

So if Cameron and Co succeed this week in bringing the WC to our football obsessed shore - remember what the Dutch discovered.

It was also good to see the once disgraced David Mellor taking a principled stand against the FIFA machine.

Back the BBC

2010-11-21T09:59:00.000+01:00

I've been in Malaysia the last few weeks helping script a few History Channel documentaries and have had little time to blog...

Coming back to Berlin, I was impressed by the rich crop of new series on the BBC. This after a dire summer!

Cherry picking at random - we have the wonderful new Attenborough series (which Jacob is enjoying too), some serious drama - and as a bonus perhaps Tony Palmer's brilliant, reconstructed documentary about Leonard Cohen - which confirmed many of my doubts about this over praised songwriter. What a wuss!

Believe me, the BBC at its best knocks all its competitors for six. And for those who think Auntie is a left wing college of conspirators, I note that the former DG Michael Grade is now a Conservative peer.

What struck me forcibly is the absence of the television of cruelty. One of the great services performed by Ben Goldacre's Bad Science was the destruction of the ghastly Gillian McKeith who is now serving out her time on I'm a Celebrity...

Telly is dominated by cycles, so the disappearance of this exploitative commissioning of contempt may simply reflect that we are on the other side of a wave. But there might be more to this.

I would venture to argue that the television of cruelty was a species of contempt most frequently focused on aspirant lower middle class families, whose bizarre antics and even excrement was offered up for the delectation of their betters. In British TV, this cruelty was always underpinned by class.

The recession changed all that - along with the precipitous decline and fall of New Labour, buried under a landslide of expenses scandals and the near pychotic behaviour of its ruling elite. We British woke up to a world of uncertainty - a national mood reflected in the pseudo victory of the Tory Party, that in coalition with the Lib Dems promises a cleaning of the stables.

In this chastened new world, which we are all just dimly coming to terms with, the churning of our cultural life has taken the sting out cruelty television, which relied on victimhood. Now we are all victims.

This is a small signal of things to come.